Rincewind among the Redskins
by A.A. Pessimal
Summary: Digging into the backstory of "Reaper Man". A magical accident flips Rincewind through time and space and into the middle of a war. Of course he's on the losing side. Can he escape the Ladies Sewing Circle or the Sun Dance Card?
1. A wallflower at the Sun Dance

Trying to resolve a conundrum raised in**_ Reaper Man _**concerning the existence of a people very much like Red Indians. In Howondaland. Trying to get them all to fit in, although those wide-open spaces might start getting a little crowded. Still, it seems to be a big place, according to the Mappe, and the Roundworld saying is

**_Ex Africa, semper aliquid nova. (there's always something new out of Africa)_**

The Latatian might be (apologies to Clodia) **_Ex Howondalaandia, semper aliquid nova._**

Homage to theclassic western films **_Little Big Man_** and**_ A Man Called Horse_**. Also to George McDonald Fraser for **_Flashman and the Redskins_**.

* * *

The heart-beat pounding drumming of the Sun Dance continued outside the tepee, muffled slightly by the thick buffalo-skin hides. The sonorous atonal chanting and ululation rose from the dancers, hopefully rising to the ears of the great Manitou, the God whose essence permeated everything in His creation with life.

Pushing it to the back of his mind, the chief sat cross legged, drawing deep on the holy herbs in the peace-pipe, seeking his own communion and guidance from the Great God.

_Some say the god manifests as a human with the head of a crocodile, whatever one of those is, with attendant birds who court death by picking his teeth, and who bring him news of what walks and speaks in the world. Others believe the God shows himself as a man with no eyes in his head, but with many eyes which float around him as the stars float in the heavens. A blind God who sees All. _

He pulled on the pipe again.

_Whatever form He takes, I just wish He would speak to me. Or She. I'm prepared to be flexible. _

A particularly loud shuddering groan reached him from one of the participants in the Sun Dance. The chief winced. He knew physical pain, if endured long enough, was a sure-fire way of provoking an ecstatic union with the God and His lesser servants, in which questions might seriously be asked and replies brought back form the Netherworld. This was the reason why his tribe persisted with torture of captives: a courtesy to them, so that they might pass into the next world and the Happy Hunting Grounds in blissful communion with the God. The method worked, alright. The chief just wasn't overly crazy about the means, which was why he was taking a less dramatic, certainly painless, but more problematical route towards mystic communion. All he had to watch out for was that he wasn't misled by Coyote, the trickster God who had to be avoided in an attempt to reach the Great Ones.

He took another long draw. He was almost there, he could feel the waves of heat and power washing over his neck and face, pulsing in waves up from his chest and neck and making his scalp tingle, opening the mystic doorway. Now if he could only fight down this terrible urge to eat, anything and everything, he'd be just fine.

A part of the chief spiraled up into the sky. He could see, far below, his seated form, still and holding the pipe. He passed higher. The tepee dwindled to a dot among many dots. He saw the lands of his peoples, dwindled now from what they had been many thousands of years ago. In the thick jungles to the sunrise, as the Disc turned, he became aware of the Tezuman people, red-skinned like them, those who had raised stone mountains and who had refined the practice of ritual torture down to an over-quick taking of the heart. They were safe in their fastness of jungle and creepers: nothing had threatened them as nothing could reach them. But in between, as the eastern jungle faded to prairie and semi-desert, the black-skinned people who had usurped their old tribal lands and forced Apache and Navaho west and north - _turnwise_ and_ hubwards_, as their compass had it – into the true desert. The chief knew that the black men, calling themselves _Kwa'Zulu_ and _Matabele_, had in their turn been forced out of former lands by the white men , the tribes of _More-Pork_ and _Boor_, who had landed in the south (_rimwards_) of the continent and taken it for their own. So, displaced, they took our land, although we still fight them and take their scalps at the edges, and deter them from taking more. Their Great Chief tried to build a _kraal_ on Apache tribal land. A great error, as the fierce and arrogant ones took pleasure in burning it and killing all its inhabitants. Then the _Paramount_, enraged, sent an army to slay the Apache. The black soldiers were no match for an invisible enemy, that harried and darted and struck at their flanks and whittled it down, without once being drawn into open battle. Like wasps goading a bear, or red soldier ants fighting black. Few survivors of that _impi_ returned south to the great Kraal of the _Paramount_.

The inner eye of the chief ascended higher. To the north (_hubwise_, they call it) of our peoples, another threat. The brown-skinned, bearded and black-eyed peoples, the ones who wrap their heads in white linen wrappings. The tribes of the _Klatchian _and the _Hershebans_, they call themselves, from beyond the great northern desert, ever seeking to expand their empire, sending feelers into our prairie and our grasslands. We fight them here too, with the outlawed Klatchian tribe of the D'Regs, those who have said to us with unforked tongue, _Our fight is your fight. Your fight is our fight. Let us fight together and enjoy the battle._

The chief smiled. He had no war with the tribe of the D'regs, and the informal alliance had served both sides well. His own people, the Latoka **(1)** Indians, rode with them to war with the Klatchians, an arrogant people who would enslave them if only they could. Slaves had been taken of his people: the chief had heard that some had escaped and made it to the great white-people-tepee-place called _Ankh-More-Pork, _which he vaguely knew was immeasurably far away in the snow country to the very far north.

He sighed. And the third and currently most immediate problem was indeed the white people, but the ones in the south, on the other side of the woodland and jungle belt that had hitherto acted as a sanitary cordon. The crazy ones, the ones their faraway home country had sent here to occupy the land, who had forced the black-skinned peoples out, who had then _displaced_ into Indian lands.

_Which is all very well, but __**we**__ have nowhere to displace to if our lands are taken. _

And they had expanded their colony outwards into the black peoples' land formerly called _Rumbabwe. _Which had in turn forced out the bulk of the Matabele people. The chief had nothing against the Matabeles, and most had disappeared into the encircling jungles, but enough was enough. And now the crazy whites, the ones who automatically despised anyone with a skin colour different to theirs, were exploring out of the jungle into the rich _veldt _- their word for our_ prairie – _to the north. Into_ our _lands.

_How much land do these people want! _

Even now, an army out of _Rhodesia _was encroaching on Indian land, seeking to _explore, pacify, report back_ on the suitability of the land for further settlement.

The Chief had called together all the tribes he could find. It ends here, he had decided, and was seeking to convince other chiefs of the need to fight in unity, to overwhelm and turn back the land-hungry colonists. _It finishes here. Either for us, or for them_. The pow-wow was to be later that night. He was hopeful; the only two tribes who had refused were the eastern desert peoples, the Navaho and the Apache, both unwilling to fight the plainsmen's battle. He had the Sioux confederation, the Kiowa, the Crow, the Blackfeet and the Comanche on side, at least for now. But would that be enough?

He toked again. The pleasurable waves passed over his skin once more .

_Great Manitou, send me your sign…._

_____________________________________-_

The Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography stretched out in his bath-tub, giving the bathroom window a long suspicious look. Left to his own devices, he was _never _going to open the wretched thing as long as he had these rooms. He didn't know which cruel and un-natural part of the geography it was going to open out onto from one minute to the next, and he certainly wasn't going to start experimenting with it. That's what had got his predecessor into trouble: as far as he could tell from the notes that had been left behind, the man had got the idea it could be controlled, and he had been obsessed with being able to open it up to any time and place he chose at will. All it had got him was a short and horrible field trip to the inside of a tyrannosaurus.

And that was the other thing: it opened up not just to any time, but to _anywhen._ The Professor knew it was a terrible dereliction of his duty to show intellectual curiosity and enrich the total sum of human knowledge, but he couldn't have cared less. He had tenure, in so far as these things are a given at Unseen University. In practice, this meant he got as many meals a day as his body could stand, a roof over his head, and his laundry done for free. He had no obligation to talk to students, despite….. he shook his head, and mentally moved on. And he got the coal. Ye Gods, he got the coal. Seven buckets a day, one for each academic title. This was why he was lying in a cold bath: at present he was trying to burn off a surplus bucketful or two. Oh, Brian usually came discreetly round to pick some up and transfer it into a sack, which then went back with him to his student digs. As far as the Professor was concerned, the more the merrier. If Brian could think of a few other undergrads who might welcome a brief tutorial, say up to five others, they could come along and seek to discuss National Exports of Llamedos, or Economic Redistribution Of Surplus Fuel Resources To Impoverished Undergraduates, at any time. Just leave me one, OK?

And then there were these other twelve academic titles that Ridcully had wished on him. Rincewind suspected the rest of the Faculty had got together to have a clear-out and dump the jobs they didn't want onto him. Well, one day there'd be a faculty member who'd be lower and more despised than Rincewind... and thankfully the signwriter hadn't yet got round to painting the twelve new titles on his door. Otherwise there'd be _nineteen _ buckets of coal outside his door every morning, rather than the current relatively manageable seven...

But so far, given the labyrynthine ways of the University, Brian was the only undergrad who'd worked out the multi-dimensional puzzle of locating his tutor's rooms. The professor wondered if the internal floor plan of the university had been set up deliberately by teaching staff seeking a quiet life.

Anyway, the fire was roaring next door to burn off the surplus coal – not as fiercely as in previous months, as Brian was making inroads on the heap. But hot enough to confine Rincewind to the bath, where he laid, cleaner than he'd ever been and somewhat wrinkled, trying to make sense of his predecessor's working diaries and notes.

Rincewind's memory flashed back over recent unpleasant events.

At every university across the infinite multiverse, a fundamental law of nature applies, which dictates that among the teaching facility there will _always_ arise a star performer. This star performer might write an academic book that perversely becomes a best –seller, even if the subject matter is dry and abstract, for instance to do with the physics of the Big Bang or the atheistic implications of evolutionary theory.

It might be somebody who has, conversely, written a best-selling work of fiction, possibly a thinly disguised account of life set at a thinly fictionalized university where considerable satirical bile is spat upon characters who are thinly fictionalized versions of his colleagues. Such a lecturer might cement his reputation by living an outrageous personal lifestyle and, despite being in his fifties, bedding as many eighteen year old female undergrads as he can. He might also blackmail his bosses with threats of leaving to allow him to draw a full-time salary for part-time work, while working the paid lecture circuit, and also porking another full-time wage for working part-time at a prestigious American university. Leading to jokes like _"Why is M****** B******* like God? Because God is here but everywhere. M****** B******* is everywhere but here."__2__**(2)**_

It might be somebody whose subject matter is so irresistible that his or her lectures are packed out, regardless of personal charisma or ease of lecture delivery.

It might in rare circumstances be a lecturer who is so good at communicating, that his or her native talent makes their lectures unmissable, even if they teach English Lit and you are doing particle physics.

Professor Rincewind, from shaky beginnings, realized he fell in the third category. Oh, it had all started innocently enough, in the bar of the Mended Drum, where he'd fallen in with a group of students and wondered at how _young_ they were getting these days. A social beer had stretched to a discussion of his recent trip to the Moon,3 **(3)** and Rincewind saw something wholly new in their faces that he'd never seen before.

They were in awe of him.

Normally the expression on any face contemplating Rincewind might convey disgust, or contempt, or a desire to cause physical pain. Rincewind was used to this. He'd never encountered _respect _before. It was wholly new to him. Savouring this new sensation over a few beers, his tongue loosened and very soon he was holding forth on how egregious, cruel and unusual the Disc's geography could be.

And they loved it.

The Drum effectively became the University's latest lecture room, with the added advantage of available beer and bar snacks. When Rincewind dropped by for a beer, word spread, and he found he didn't have to buy his own beer. In fact, he began to keep a regular schedule, so as to make it easier for students to attend. Then he started planning ahead for his next lecture. He even started to prepare notes.

Rincewind had in fact become a popular university tutor, with students of his own.

Which had not gone un-noticed, nor indeed unremarked, by other members of the Faculty. Rincewind had become horribly aware of this when, partway through an impromptu lecture, to a packed bar, on his travels in Krull and the Circumfence, he was horrified to see Arch-Chancellor Ridcully, the Dean, the Senior Wrangler and Ponder Stibbons occupying discreet seats and quietly listening. With intent.

He swallowed, heavily, and decided that since he was in Modo's finest compost, he might as well go down with a flourish, and continued regardless, even permitting a few questions at the end.

"And when you're in trouble," he concluded, "never hesitate to run. That way you get to see a bit more geography at some speed, and there's usually a friendly bit where you can hide until the trouble's passed you by and you can safely come out again. Thank you, and goodbye!"

He was just about to put his words into practice when he turned and saw the three Bledlows, who all raised pints to him and smiled amicably.

Ridcully stood and addressed the class.

"Thank you to Professor Rincewind there for a fascinatin' and instructive discourse on Applied Egregious Geography, and I even see some of you bothered enough to read up on the subject and get books out of the Library! That's two bloody rare things in this University, the first one bein' that this was a lecture with standin' room only! Now if you people will excuse us, we're goin' to hold a faculty meetin'. I'm _sure_ you've got other classes to attend or essays to write?"

The hint was taken, and the bar swiftly emptied. Ridcully sent Stibbons to get a round in.

"I don't believe it. He gets more students to his lectures than me, Runes and the Wrangler put together!" the Dean petulantly complained, pure jealousy condensing in his words.

"Yes, Dean. But I believe the reason for that is down to you, Runes and the Wrangler all takin' very great care to avoid the students and to give no lectures at all!" remarked Ridcully. "You can't fault this fella for tryin', and _some_ of us have got to teach the buggers! Patrician said so, in as many words, after that damn' inspection!"

It had begun to dawn on Rincewind that he might just be in a different sort of trouble to the one he anticipated. One that involved work.

"After all, Stibbons here puts in a lot of face-time with students down the HEM and has a lot to do with the degree in Applied Thaumaturgy. I'm wonderin', since Rincewind seems to have acquired interested students, _despite bein' told his appointment is a honorific with no teachin' responsibilities, _whether we can't take advantage of it. Vetinari's damn inspector **(3a)** said we should improve our ratio for student-teacher contact, and I've just seen a single faculty member hold the attention of eighty students for an hour. That's got to be good for the numbers!"

Ridcully smiled, benignly.

"Professor Rincewind, you are talkin' yourself into teachin' a degree in Cruel and Unusual Geography! Well done, that man!"

Rincewind smiled, weakly.

"Is any, you know, actual pay involved here?" he asked, more in hope than optimism.

"Now don't go gallopin' ahead of yourself here!" Ridcully admonished him. "Deliver the teachin', and there _may_ be a modest stipend in it for you. Nothin' extravagant, mind."

"Hmmmph!" the Dean fumed, nose still out of joint. "Damned flashy young trendy lecturers, I don't know.."

"The _real_ money's in writing books." the Senior Wrangler explained, cheerfully.

"You're also Professor of Fretwork, aren't you, Rincewind?"

"And five other titles, yes."

"Good. Got you a pupil. You've seen the woodworkin' shop, haven't you?"

This was how Rincewind came to meet Brian. **(4) **Having been forced by Ridcully to lead a class in fretwork, Rincewind survived by frankly explaining that he knew as little as his pupil, so they might as well get the books out of the library and muddle through it together. Brian, an easy-going youth in whom Rincewind recognized something of a kindred spirit, agreed immediately, and three times a week they met up in the University's woodworking shop to butcher innocent pieces of boxwood together.

After a few weeks, they suspected they were starting to get proficient at it. Rincewind shrugged, and reached for another sheet of boxwood….

"YOUCH!" he let go of the wood and sucked his fingers.

"What happened?" Brian asked.

"I could have sworn that bloody wood bit me!"

"Probably a splinter. Let me try… AAARGH!"

Rincewind looked at the sheet of wood with great suspicion. It reminded him of…. Surely not? The colour was right. The grain was suspiciously familiar. The wood radiated deep-seated irritation at the world…

"It's bloody sapient pearwood!" he said. "No wonder it bit!"

Rincewind donned thick leather gauntlets. He felt uncharacteristically pugnacious. Several years of love-hate relationship with the Luggage coalesced into a desire to do harm to the wood it was made of, on general principles.

"Just let me get this under the router. Cut the bugger into manageable pieces…"

He wrestled the wood sheet, which fought him all the way, to the vertical fretsaw. Seeking to cut it into two pieces, he forced it towards the whirring saw blade. Two things happened. The blade shattered into shrapnel, forcing Brian to duck hurriedly. There was an octarine flash. And Rincewind was gone.

___________________________________________-

The tepee flap pulled back The sounds of the Sun Dance outside grew unpleasantly louder. The Chief stirred, and ordered

"Shut that bloody door, will you?"

"OK, Bullshitter!" said the voice. The chief winced.

"Look, how many times? Just _Bull_, Ok? Nothing else, just Bull!"

Thee was a reversed intake of breath, a backwards-whistle-through-the-teeth noise.

"Tricky things, names." said the newcomer. "You can't mess around with them. They've got to be just so, _exactly_ as delivered at the moment of birth!"

The Chief glared at his medicine man, Dancing Weasel. He suspected the man was enjoying this. Not for the first time, he cursed the literal-mindedness of his tribe, and reflected that had he been born a few minutes earlier, his mother would have looked out of the tepee and named him Squatting Bull. Not ideal, but it would have been better than the name he'd _got_. And he was stuck with it. The only legitimate way he could change it was to win a major battle or perform a deed of great heroism. And even _then_ he suspected they'd still use the old name, in a low snickering voice.

"What have you got for me, Weasel?" he asked. The medicine man adjusted his buffalo-skull head-dress.

"First visions coming in from the lads on the Sun Dance, guv'nor. There's a message talking in the air…"

"It's from Crazy Horse?"

"His spirit been riding everywhere, guv!"

"A warning?"

Only a whacked-out crazy like Horse would endure the agony of being skewered through his chest muscles by spikes attached to the Sun Pole by long ropes. And then dance himself into a frenzy. For three long agonizing days.

"He says the white man is approaching in two columns. One of horse soldiers, one of men on foot. They're looking for us but can't find anyone. There's bad medicine between the chief in charge of the horse soldiers and the chief in charge of the foot soldiers. The Great God told him we can win the battle, but we need the white medicine man first. Him heap big unlucky, brings trouble."

"A white medicine man?"

"That's what the manitous whisper of. The Great God will send him. Through the living wood."

Bull sighed. This was the problem with the sun dance. You inflict agonizing pain on yourself, bleed a lot, drink little, and stagger round with exhaustion for three days. Of course you'll get a vision.

"Then he started mumbling about giant purple spiders and loosely in the sky with diamonds. I reckon that's all the useful vision we'll get out of Horse this Sun Dance."

"Cut him down, then. He's suffered enough. How far away is this white man's army, anyway?"

"About a week, according to Horse."

"Send scouts out."

"Will do, Bullshitter"

"And it's Bull, right?" the chief roared at the closing tepee flap.

____________________________________-

Rincewind found himself looking up at a blue sky filtered through long luminous green grass. He felt strangely tired and disorientated and just wanted to lie there. It looked like a beautiful summer afternoon, as far as he could tell through the green. No hurry. But this isn't the woodwork craft shop. Evidently another bloody magical accident. With that bloody sapient pearwood. Ah well, the Luggage is bound to catch up…Rincewind considered standing up. He'd need to assess exactly how cruel and unnatural this bit of geography was. Especially with regard to water and food. But there was no hurry.

In the deep grass, a dog-like creature moved. It was aware of Rincewind. It sniggered to itself, anticipating amusement.

_____________________________________________-

The Luggage stirred and awoke. It hopped down purposely from the top of the wardrobe, and stomped out into the corridor, homing in on a signal that its unspecified senses were receiving. It had been called. It would follow. As always, its passing spread a certain amount of consternation to the workings of the University. Wizards, who had faced evil multi-tentacled monstrosities from the Dungeon Dimensions without flinching, blanched and got out of the way. Housemaids pushing trollies laden with fresh linen and bedding backed up promptly to allow it to pass. Sensing something amiss, Mustrum Ridcully fell in behind it, bellowing for Faculty members to join him at his earliest convenience.

Trailing senior wizards, the Luggage made its way to the woodwork room. It stormed in, and there was a brief flurry of activity. Eventually, when the noise stopped, Brian poked his head up from behind a sturdy workbench. He registered several senior wizards just as cautiously poking their heads around the doorframe. Meanwhile, the ply sheet of sapient pearwood, about six feet by four, had retreated as far as it could get into a corner, with a very angry Luggage confronting it, and occasionally butting it for emphasis.

"OK, lad." Ridcully said to Brian, "Explain what's been happenin' here. Where's Rincewind, for one thing?"

Brian explained. Ridcully frowned, then inspected the wood sheet in the corner, which now radiated frightened submission in the face of an alpha Luggage.

"Sapient pearwood. And he was tryin' to saw it?" He shook his head in disbelief. "That wood defends itself. In a magical environment like the University it has a lot of natural background magic to draw on. Sounds like it protected itself by chuckin' Rincewind into a different time and place."

He paused.

"Stibbons, fire up your thinking engine, would you?"

______________________-

Rincewind moved, he hoped carefully, through the tall grass. His coward's senses were telling him, urgently, that there were other people nearby and, given his usual luck in these matters, should be presumed hostile. He was blissfully unaware, as yet, that to an outside observer, he was leaving a wake of rippling grass like the stern-wave of a ship. As well as that, the tall Wizzard's Hat, moving in a seemingly self-propelled way above the prairie grass, was a dead giveaway to watching eyes. Rincewind, busy sorting out his priorities (_Where am I? What's the least eventful way back to Ankh-Morpork – it doesn't have to be the fastest, just the least eventful? Is this bloody grass ever going to end, so I can see where I'm going_?), did not at first notice the pony riders, silently converging on the pointy hat moving in the grass, like the fin of a large fish moves in the water. He was following a slight incline downwards, working on a half-remembered piece of geography, that you move downhill to find water. And it was shaping up to be a hot day…

The grass rustled around Rincewind . He looked up and his bowels quivered. The man on the pony was a sort of coppery-red colour, with greasy black hair held back by a headband with a single feather in it. Bare from the waist up, his body and face were painted with varicolour lines and streaks, his legs in crudely sewn and fringed leather britches. But what Rincewind noticed most of all was the lance, a home-made sort of affair mounting a crudely cast metal point. The point, of course, being the point, which Rincewind estimated was as capable of making a hole in him as any impersonally mass-produced civilized weapon. He looked to his left. Yup. Another muscular and tough-looking copper-skinned rider, also with a lovingly home-made lance, this time with a depressingly sharp flint point bound securely on with rawhide.

Both riders rode expertly around him, flattening down the long grass, until they flanked him on either side. They ululated a high-pitched whooping war cry, then fixed Rincewind with a steady and unfriendly gaze.

Rincewind pointed to himself, and said "Friend?" in a hopeful voice.

_(Is this the heap big unlucky, brings trouble, white medicine man Crazy Horse told the Bullshitter to expect?}_asked the first warrior.

_{Heap unlucky for him. Whiteskins not popular in our camp right now. If he isn't, the Ladies Sewing Circle get him} _replied the second warrior. The first warrior shrugged.

_{Where did those two idiots get to, anyway?}_

There was a sound as of somebody not used to riding falling off a pony. A nearby voice said "Oh, shit…"

_{They're here now, by the sound of it}_

Two more copper-skinned Indians joined the party. They both wore plain headbands without feathers, in one case slightly askew and threatening to obscure the vision from his right eye. Rincewind studied them. If the first two were in the absolute peak of physical health, with gleamingly oiled muscles and perfect white teeth, what could be said about the newcomers… also bare above the waist and warpainted, after a fashion, they looked underweight, skinny, somewhat seedy, and the teeth were somewhat less than white. In fact, a familiar sort of yellow. And instead of home-sewn buckskins, they were wearing… civilized trousers. And hadn't one of them just sworn in good homespun Morporkian when he fell off a horse he was unfamiliar with?

Rincewind had only a few seconds to consider if this conferred an advantage, when the two original warriors, the ones who seemed to know their business, leapt from the saddle and grabbed him, roughly. He didn't struggle. In his way he was an expert in a specialized sort of fieldcraft: the moment to escape was not now. So why waste your energy fighting? When it was time, he'd know.

Rincewind found his hands and legs trussed to a long pole. Around him, a discussion was going on. The two warriors who knew their business were giving instructions to the two who didn't. Rincewind felt himself being lifted in the air, pole and all, and slung fore-and-aft between two horses, which were being walked by the two obviously trainee warriors.

From underneath, Rincewind asked

"One of you speaks Morporkian? Can you tell me where I am, please?"

"You don't know, friend?" said the one with the askew headband.

"No. Just got here. Magical accident at the University"

"So you _are_ a wizard. Even if you spell it wrong. Only one "Z", friend".

The accent was Morporkian, But the body speaking it was as bizarrely strange as any he'd seen.

"Might save your life when the Bull sees you, friend. You'd better hope so. White men ain't popular round these parts right now."

"Er… what are the alternatives?" Rincewind inquired, politely.

"Well, you might be asked to take your partner in the Sun Dance" the Morporkian Indian said, reflectively.

"Doesn't sound too bad."

Rincewind's new friend, or at least _not-enemy_, sniggered. "You think so? The alternative is being sent to assist the ladies in the Sewing Circle."

"What, embroidery, samplers, _dantellieuse, _sort of thing. Still doesn't sound too bad."

The Morporkian speaker sighed. "You'll see for yourself back at the camp, I suppose. The name's One-Man-Bucket, by the way. That's my twin brother."

He indicated a sullen, unspeaking type who looked as if he were working out some great inner anger.

" Best you just call him Two-Dogs."

There was an uneasy pause. One-Man-Bucket filled it.

"Look, we're Latoka Sioux. White men call us Redskins. Can't think why. My parents, they made it to Ankh-Morpork. Dad worked in construction. Head for heights, you see. Born steeplejack. Our Mum got a job down the Palace. She worked this con, see, pretending to be an Indian Princess , and the Patrician fell for it. Nice little earner. We was both born there. Immigant family, right? Talked Latoka in the home. Morporkian in the street. Anyway, Latokas have this really literal thing about naming a baby. Mum has to look out of the tepee at the moment of birth, or in her case out through the bedroom window overlooking Old Cobblers, and name the child after the first thing she sees. You with me?"

"So far, yes" said Rincewind, carefully. He noticed the other Indian, Two-Dogs, had stiffened and was clenching his teeth.

"So I'm One-Man-Throwing-A-Bucket-Of-Water-Over-Two-Dogs. One-Man-Bucket, for short. My brother? Best call him just Two Dogs. _Really_ best just call him Two-Dogs."

Rincewind looked blank.

"He was born a minute or so before me, y'see. But the guy to really feel sorry for is the Chief of this tribe. His mother stuck her head out of the tepee and saw…_Bull-Twitching-Its-Tail-To-One-Side-And-Making-Dung. _Shitting Bull, for short. Everyone calls him Bullshitter, or just Bull."

"Very unfortunate" said Rincewind. "But what brought you back here?"

One-Man-Bucket sighed and his shoulders slumped.

"All we wanted to do was meet family, see our heritage, maybe have a Vision Quest, right, then go back to a place with civilized bars and boozers. Gods, I miss the Mended Drum!"

"Never seen you in there?" Rincewind questioned.

"Nor I you. Odd, that. Anyway. We take ship, work our passage, drop off on the coast, come inland, meet the tribe and the family. It only bleedin' well turns out there's a war on, with white men invading the tribal lands, all hands capable of holding a tomahawk are needed in the warband, yes you _can_ conscientiously object, we're sure we can find a job for you, let's see, there's a Sun Dance scheduled for next Thursday, you're dancing…"

Rincewind was furiously thinking. _Windle Poons. What was said about the old fart? He turned zombie. Met Mrs Cake. She's still around. Of course, that's where I've heard the name before. One-Man-Bucket is hr spirit guide, But to be spirit guide, don't you need to be dead? Kind of essential entry qualification, really…_

"Mr Bucket. Assume I'm thick and I've lost my wits. What year was it when you left Ankh-Morpork to come out here?"

"1903, friend!"

Rincewind slumped against his binding. That dratted bloody sapient pearwood hadn't just sent him to the middle of flaming Howondaland. It had also moved him the best part of a hundred years back in time. And what happened in 1903 in Howondaland? Think, Rincewind. This means you can sit out the dancing and get excused sewing, if you play it right……

The dog-like creature sniggered again. It sounded like a hyena's laugh. Nervously, the group of Indians looked anxiously at each other, and pressed on a little faster with their captive.

* * *

**(1)** The Latoka: a name conferred by other Howondaland Plains Indians, meaning _**They who smoke much of the holy herbs. **_

**(2)** This author attended the University of East Anglia, Norwich, and at various times was taught by creative writing genius and flawed human being Professor Malcolm Bradbury. As well as Lorna and Vic Sage and Bradbury's sworn enemy David Lodge.

**(3)** See _**The Last Hero.**_

**(3a)** The Government Inspector who inspected the University at Vetinari's behest was, in fact.** A.E. Pessimal.** This is alluded to in the opening chapters of** _Thud!,_** and is dealt with at greater length in Terry Pratchett's short story, **The Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices. (**available via the **Terry Pratchett L-Space Web)**

**(4)** Brian appears as a character in _**A Hat Full of Sky **_as the Dibbler-inclined Dwarf Zikzak's sales assistant, selling dubious magical tat to gullible adolescent witches. He reveals to Tiffany Aching that he studied fretwork at Unseen University. And guess what – one of Rincewind's grab-bag of academic titles is Professor of Fretwork.

* * *

For those who asked, this story can be placed just after **Science of Discworld II** and just before **Thud!** . It is perhaps a year or so before the events related in **A Hat Full Of Sky.** (Brian has to graduate and get a job in Lancre selling tat to witches)


	2. Enter the Colonel

_**Rincewind and the Redskins – c2**_

Colonel George Reynaud Rjuister sat in his tent and brooded. He was furiously angry, which in many ways was his datum state. He summoned his soldier-servant to remove his tight riding boots, and took pleasure in sending him stumbling across the tent. Dismissing him, Rjuister brooded on the damned injustice that had seen him demoted from General's rank, which he'd briefly enjoyed during the War of Independence and the consequent Civil War.

Twirling his greying-blonde moustaches, he damned Blots to his Kerrigian Hell, him and his damnable _reasonableness_ about it all.

_Be realistic, George! The war's over! We've driven out the Ankh-Morporkians. Their army, or what was left of it, surrendered to us, at least in parts in thanks to you. Then we got the Morporkians in the Carp Colony to see sense and realise their future is assured in an independent state, no longer a colony. We have no interest in throwing them out. We need them, to make this nation work! But now the fighting's over, the Ankh-Morporkians will never return, and we're a new Republic at peace, we do not need so large an Army. If the Army shrinks, as it must, it will not need so many Generals. The only job such an Army has for you, and it is a honourable one, is as a colonel commanding a very much reduced cavalry regiment. It's that or leave the Army, George. __**(1)**_

Again, Rjuister damned General Jan Blots, the architect of what Ankh-Morpork was already referring to as the Boor War.

The Motherland had sent an army to help defend the colony against the Kwa'Zulu threat nearly thirty years before. Despite the early disaster at Isandlhwana, where the inept Eorle, assisted by Lord Rust, had lost two thousand men in a morning against an enemy they had woefully underestimated, they had recovered and held the consequent Zulu invasion of the Boor homeland at Lawke's Drain. This had given the redoubtable Lord Ramkin, possibly Ankh-Morpork's only capable general, time to gather an army together that had smashed the Kwa'Zulu at Ulundhi, and took away the threat to the Staadt from that quarter for quite a long time. Ramkin had then pulled his Army out of the Kwa'Zulu homeland, pointing out he was _not_ there to bring about its complete destruction. If you Boors want to invade it, he had said, you're on your own and you do not have my support. Without the strength on their own to deliver a killing blow to the hereditary enemy, the Boors had reluctantly retreated to their side of the border.

And the Ankhians had stayed. Lord Ramkin had been acclaimed as Governor-General in the name of the Patrician, but had privately said to Boor leader Jan Blots and Carp Colony leader Charles Smith-Rhodes that as far as he was concerned, he was a figurehead: it's your country. "You make the decisions, and if they're good ones, I'll just nod". Ramkin had treated his tenure as Governor as an extended holiday for himself and Lady Ramkin; it had even involved unofficial state visits to the Kwa'Zulu, who respected him as a war leader who had beaten them fairly and dealt with them with justice and wisdom afterwards.

And then he'd returned home and a new Patrician took over. And their army stayed. And relations deteriorated. And when the new Governor, Lord Eorle, insisted on directly ruling the Colony, war broke out. Eorle insisted on leading the Ankhian troops in "restoring civil order". He did this so ham-fistedly the whole of the Boor nation rose in revolt. A series of shattering defeats followed, at Magersfontein, Stornberg, and Spion Kop. Harried by General Rjuister's cavalry forces, the remnants of the Ankh-Morporkian Army fell back on the fortress garrison town of Mafeking and were besieged there, desperately awaiting relief from home. Only when it became clear that no relief would ever come did they surrender. General Blots disarmed them, and allowed them the choice of remaining as citizens of the new republic, or a one-way sea passage home. **(2) **Lord Ramkin, by then retired, was said to have wept tears of rage, frustration, and sadness, at the stupidity of the men who'd wasted an army and set back everything he'd tried to bring about in Howondaland.

And Rjuister looked back on the War of Independence with justifiable pride. It had been his finest hour as a fighting soldier.

And _this_ was how they rewarded him! Demotion to Colonel. Postings to Gods-forsaken frontier postings on the edge of civilization, endlessly patrolling the borders for signs of incursion, with only brief leaves back to the city where he could petition the politicians for restoration of his old rank.

This expedition to the northern plains to fight the redskin might well be his very last chance to prove himself as a military leader… and to make it a thousand times more aggravating, it has to be done with that dratted damned jumped-up Boor farmer General Kriminel. **(3)**

Rjuister sighed.

Although a Boor, he took it as an article of faith passed down the generations of his family that he was directly descended from, and related to, the noble Rust family of Ankh-Morpork. He rather prided himself that his was where his presumed military genius came from, and an artlessly modest reference or two to his family relationship with one of the Heroes of Lawke's Drain hadn't harmed his career.

In fact, this was actually correct.

A couple of hundred years ago, his many-times great grandmother had been a Kerrigian housemaid in the service of the Rusts. One night, the then Lord Rust had taken his _droit de seigneur_ out for exercise, taking it as his right that mere housemaids should be _glad _to succumb to his attentions. And if the general stock of the peasantry should be improved by a few Rust genes, she should be jolly _grateful,_ even though there was no question of his ever acknowledging a bastard, dear me no.

Dismissed without a reference as soon as her pregnancy became apparent, for _immoral behaviour_ and becoming a _fallen woman_, with Rust characteristically denying any part in the affair, Rjuister's strong-minded ancestor took passage on a colony ship bound for Howondaland. Here, she reinvented herself as a widow of a fallen soldier in one of Rust's regiments, and a kindly Boor farmer, coincidentally called Hans Rjuister, took her in and made a honest woman of her.

And although he had inherited some useful military sense from generations of men who had ridden with the Boor civilians' militia, the _kommandos, _all the native arrogance, all the unshakeable belief in abilities he did not in fact possess, all the rudeness and incivility, all the exaggerated sense of entitlement and all the thick-skulled stupidity of the Rust family had run true down the generations and coalesced, some might say _congealed_, in young George.

And here he was now, in command of six hundred officers and men of the Seventh Cavalry. Bound for death or glory. _Their _death; _his_ glory.

There was a discreet coughing from outside the tent.

"Yes?" said Rjuister, impatiently.

"Scouts are in, sir."

Major Reno, his second-in-command, no breeding and a liability in the Mess, but he'd been told not to even _think _of transfering him out of the Seventh. They were stuck with each other.

"Bring them in." the colonel commanded.

He looked with distaste at the two local Indians recruited to track down others of their kind and act as local guides. There were Crow Indians, he knew. Other Indians seemed to regard the Crow as suspect, as if their loyalty were conditional, but there were worse turncoats than the Crow. The two specimens in front of him were in fact Scalbie Indians, members of a tribe that the rest of the Indian nation would pointedly sit as far away from as they could, at a pow-wow or chiefs' gathering.

Dirty, scruffy, addicted to tobacco, firewater and any other vice man had devised, they were the Gnolls of the Indian plains, living at the margins, prone to knocking on a neighbour's tepee door to beg a buffalo haunch, a light for the fire, oh, and have you got any spare _wampum_, guv?

No, the Scalbie tribe were unreliable and untrustworthy, but with the rest of the red buggers having disappeared into thin air, they were the best he could get.

"Report." he said, briskly, trying not to breathe through his nose and wanting them out of his command tent as quickly as he could.

"Sioux warriors seen patrolling, _kemo sabe_." said the lead Scalbie, knucking his brow. "They ran when they saw us"

_Ran when they smelt you, more probably, _thought Rjuister. But he nodded.

"We think they are in valley of the Big Horn, _kemo sabe_. Chiefs have called Plains Nations there to make last stand."

"How far away is this Big Horn?"

"Six, maybe seven days march, _kemo sabe_"

"Good!" Rjuister said, dismissing the Indians. Their smell lingered, however.

"We send out patrols of our own, Reno. Bring them to battle! Test our mettle and their quality as a foe!"

Rjuister thumped the map-table, exultantly.

"By the way, what's this _kemo sabe_ mean?"

Reno cleared his throat. This was going to be a tricky one.

"I believe it to be a term of respect to a social better and great white leader, sir."

Rjuister beamed. He was getting the respect due to him. Good.

Meanwhile outside the tent, the two Scalbie scouts watched a herd of bison lumber by. A large cow cocked her tail and paused to deposit a great steaming heap of _kemo sabe_ on the prairie. The two Indians nodded, in a moment of harmony with the world. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote howled.

"Did we make it clear _whose_ Last Stand happens at the Big Horn?" one said to the other. The second Scalbie shrugged, indifferently.

"He seems to have got the idea it's going to be somebody else's."

"Good..."

* * *

**(1) **This, of course, was at the heart of George Armstrong Custer's poisonous resentment – his necessary demotion from General to Colonel in a reduced peacetime army at the end of the American Civil War. He saw men he perceived to be of lesser ability allowed to keep higher rank, and allowed envy to eat at him. The next eleven years after 1865 were ruled by his ego and his attempts to demonstrate to higher command that he should be promoted to General. After alienating himself from his officers, offending his superiors, and making life hell for his enlisted men, the culminating attempt to prove his ability was the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. He didn't prove his military ability – in fact the total opposite – but created a legend that lives on to this day…

**(2)**Loosely based on the Boer War in Roundworld, except here the Boers defeat the colonial power of Ankh-Morpork. Dealt with in more detail – or will be when it's finished – in my novella _**Ripping Yarn.**_

**(3) **The military commander of the US Army's expedition down the Big Horn Valley was not Custer, but the rather plodding and uninspired General _**Crook**_, who he despised. Think Selachii and Venturi in joint charge of an Army… yes, recipe for disaster here.


	3. Rincewind meets an old friend

_**Rincewind and the Redskins 3**_

Rincewind found himself swaying gently along, hanging upside-down from a long unyielding pole by his wrists and ankles. Al sensation in his hands and feet had gone, and his shoulders hurt abominably, but worse had happened, he supposed. At least this meant he had a chance of continuing to live – they wouldn't have gone to the trouble of bringing him in alive, otherwise. Minus points – he was still firmly tied up, which led him to suppose that he wasn't entirely a guest and blood-brother of the tribe.

While dangling, he searched his memory for what he could remember about Howondaland Central Plains Indians. It wasn't exactly encouraging. The tribes came in four distinct groupings. Widdershins, out in the desert country, were the relatively civilised Navaho, who lived in towns, even small cities, built of adobe (what they hoped was only mud), or carved into the living rock. They co-existed with the savage Apache, a nomadic people who practiced warm hospitality to travellers, of the hot-knife-and-nice-hot-fire variety. Other Indian races, such as the gentle and unworldly Yaqui, had been hunted almost to extinction by Apache and neighbouring Kwa'Zulu both. Well, it's hard to fight when you're stoned out of your brains on peyote cactus and tequila, the two things the Yaqui had devised to make desert existence bearable. In the deepest jungles way out widdershins, you got the Tezuman Indians, who Rincewind had already encountered. **(1) **Their concept of hospitality to visitors revolved around pioneering heart surgery, but with no resident Igor to put everything back properly afterwards.

In the Turnwise and Rimwards woodlands, which as you went further Rimwards shaded into the true deep forest and jungle, lived the Iroquis confederation of tribes, who were continually fighting a guerrilla war against incursion from their nearest neighbour, the Union of Rimwards Howondaland, originally composed of white settlers – well, if you washed enough grime off, they'd have been white – from Ankh-Morpork and Sto Kerrig. Something nudged at Rincewind's memory, to do with the year being 1903. He nudged it off for now. Anyway, the Iroquis attitude to encroaching white-skinned people usually involved scalping and death on a ceremonial bonfire, didn't it…

Over on the coast, you got the settled Indian peoples, the Pince-Nez and the Blackfeet and the Scalbies and others, who made a living from the sea and were as peaceable as it got. After some historic disagreements and early misunderstandings with horned-helmeted white-skinned people coming by sea in their longboats for the traditional Hubland purpose of rape, pillage, and land appropriation, the coastal Indians now tended to welcome white-skinned visitors by ceremonially sacrificing them to the Sea Gods, to ensure smooth waters and good fishing.

Rincewind, sensing a pattern emerging, sighed. From his upsidedown position, he could see no coast, smell no salt water, nor hear no seagulls. Nor could he see dense deciduous forest, and there was a definite lack of sand and loose arid stone underneath. Just this rolling prairie and tall green grass fading to corn-yellow. Must be the Plains Indians, then. Let's see… the nomadic and pitiless pony-soldiers of the Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne and Sioux. The more pastoral and settled Crow and Cherokee, but still capable of fighting like demons when annoyed. The Arapaho, who occupied the border where the plains gave way to desert, hard fighters, as anyone living in a semi-desert with Apaches for neighbours had to be. Now according to the guidebooks in the Library, the Kiowa practiced hospitality to visitors, of the skinning-you-alive-slowly-and pitilessly-over-a-period-of-three-days sort. The Comanche allegedly removed your liver, made pâté out of it, then fed it back to you while you still lived. Now One-Man-Bucket had said his people were Latoka Sioux, hadn't he? What did they do to captives…

Rincewind saw the scenery slowly alter, and a hubbub as of many voices came to meet his ears. Children appeared, running alongside the returning scouting party and its captive. By straining his neck, Rincewind could see the beginnings of a massive encampment of… strange-looking roughly conical tents, made out of animal-hides wrapped around long thick poles. Men, women and children were moving around, the men dressed as the warriors who were bringing him in, more indolent, whilst the women appeared to be doing all the work. And the _smell…. _a mixture of long-unwashed bodied wholly uncontaminated by soap. Cooking fires. Dung. Lots of dung. Animals. Both living, and butchery smells of ones who weren't, in varying stages from _dinner_ to _decomposition_. It _pervaded_, like Foul Ole Ron on a summer's day.

Rincewind took a long and blissful breath of the air.

"I know. Just like home, innit?" said One-Man-Bucket. Even his brother smiled. You could be nostalgically reminded of Ankh-Morpork in even the strangest places.

The procession wound on, through what felt like several miles of tepees, encamped along a riverbank and associated flood-plain surrounded by hills and bluffs on all sides. Finally, it halted, and Rincewind was unceremonially cut free, slumping to the ground with an "oof". He laid there for a while, encouraging the blood-flow back to hands and feet. Finally, he was jerked upright by the unfriendly Indians, who half-dragged him to a tall bare pole. Two long hide cords hung from it. These were secured to Rincewind's wrists, which were tied up above his head, but not so firmly that he couldn't move around his pole to see in all directions.

_(Hold him here. Until the women-who-sew are ready.}_

_{Won't the Chief want to see him first? The idiot, Man-With-White-Man's-Metal-Water-Gourd, thinks he is a white medicine man. Maybe the one Chief Bullshitter told us to look out for.}_

_{If the Chief has come down from his Vision Quest _(the Indian sniggered) _then we tell him.}_

_{Hai! Funny how Chief Bull has Vision Quest every night with sacred herbs. His squaw get sent out for munchies too often!}_

"Mr Bucket? What are they saying?" Rincewind asked, politely.

"Oh, you'll have to wait here till the Chief's ready to see you. Just, what do you call it, a formality." Bucket said, shiftily. Rincewind wondered if he was being told everything. An agonised burbling scream cut through the air.

"What the hell was that?" Rincewind asked, alarmed.

"Oh, just Crazy Horse." One-Man-Bucket said, dismissively. "Stupid sod always wants to be last man standing in the Sun Dance. _Renowned_ for it, he is. That's four days and nights now."

"Er… this Sun Dance thing." Rincewind said, doubtfully. "Goes on a while, does it?"

"You might say that, yeah. Once you're in it and they've skewered you through the chest muscles and tied you to the pole by the skewers, you don't have the option of sitting it out."

"Run that by me again, would you?" Rincewind requested. "With specific attention paid to little details like _skewer_ and _chest muscles_ and being tied to a pole…"

One-Man-Bucket obligingly explained, from the cheerful point of view of one who knows he is never, ever, going to volunteer himself for this sort of Vision Quest, ever. This sort of explanation, by universal narrative custom, involves lots of cheerfully related lavish detail of the cumulative effects of pain and blood loss and exhaustion and dehydration over several days. Rincewind threw up.

"I'll leave you to it, then." One-Man-Bucket said, cheerfully. "Look, there's no ban on bringing you water. I'll try to get back here with a drink. Oh, here's your hat. I rescued it."

He put the WIZZARD hat on Rincewind's head, thoughtfully adjusted it to the correct angle, waved, and walked off. Rincewind suddenly felt all alone. He also felt a little bit peeved about being ignored. Nobody appeared to be paying him the slightest bit of attention. Once, an Indian child stood and looked thoughtfully at him for a while, industriously excavating a nostril, as children will, then decided he was boring and wandered off.

The long hot day moved on.

Rincewind's next bit of excitement occurred when an elderly Indian woman, trailing a group of excited and giggling young women and girls, walked up to him and studied him critically while the old woman chattered on, in the Voice of Authority.. It felt innocent enough, but he was not deceived.

It all reminded him of seeing a class of girls from the Assassins' School being marched between classes on different School sites. They had passed, on the way, a Watch patrol who were trying to recover the body of a roofing worker who had fallen from a height. No teacher will waste the opportunity for an impromptu lesson, and the teacher supervising the class had stopped, said "Just one moment, if you please, Lance-Constable", and explained to her girls, with forensic detachment, that these are the sort of wounds that YOU, Petley Minor, might get if you lose focus and fail to concentrate while edificeering! I know Miss Band's worried about that, as she asked me to have a word with you! Regard the un-natural twist in the neck just there . Broken between the? Miss Acle-Brandon? Spit it out, girl, I haven't got all day! Anyone? Fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae!. Just beneath the skull and _exactly_ the point where the human neck is weakest, a point to bear in mind if using the garrotte!"

No, Miss Sanderson-Reeves could learn – and give – a class or two out here. **(2)**

Rincewind went "Hey!" with alarm as the old woman pulled he front of his robes open.

_(Hmmm. A bit scrawny. We'll be lucky to get much out of this one! Maybe one big hunting panorama using skin continuously removed from the chest and back. What do you think… Gazelle-Drinking-From-Stream?}_

_(I think perhaps we use the small blue glass beads and the red dyed wooden beads to make a decorative edging motif all the way around, together with the dyed linen yarn}_

_{Hmm. A bit showy, and for maximum pain we need the greatest number of stitches per inch. Remember, girls, the more pain, the more fitting it is to the God when the client finally dies! Although from the look of this one, I'd give it no longer than a day, maybe less. Doe-Deer-At Edge-of-Wood? Come on, girl, the _client_ might have all day, but I don't! }_

_(Errr.. Lady Kill-Man-With-Single-Lash-Of-Her-Tongue, the very best beads and braiding are reserved only for the true heroes who endure for days. On a specimen like this, materials of the third or fourth grade only should be employed.}_

It was lucky for Rincewind that a group of Indian men passed at that point, carrying the limp body of a warrior he presumed to be Crazy Horse, with two metal skewers protruding lengthwise from his chest, dried blood staining his torso and breeches, white flecks of foam at his mouth_, _jerked up, pointed weakly but excitedly at Rincewind and shouted something in the Lakota tongue.

_{That's him! That's the White Medicine Man! See how unlucky he is! Tied up and with the Ladies' Sewing Circle gathered round him! Tell the Bull! Tell the Bull!"}_

Then he subsided into delirium again.

Kill-Man-With-Single-Lash-Of-Her-Tongue clucked disappointedly and led the girls off.

_{It's all for the best, girls. He wouldn't have lasted five minutes and we'd only have been blunting needles and wasting beads.}_

Nothing else happened for a long time. One-Man-Bucket was as good as his word, returning with water and apologetically helping Rincewind to drink. He said it looked as if the Chief will see you, but only after this big pow-wow with all the other chiefs.

"Could be an hour, could be tomorrow morning. But at least you're not going to be tortured. Then again, I expect you've got a spell or two up your sleeve, hey?"

He nudged Rincewind in the ribs and winked.

" You won't let it get that far. Not a wizard from Unseen. Just remember who brung you water, hey? "

The evening darkened, slowly. A large red-coloured dog came and squatted in front of Rincewind. The camp was full of dogs: several had in fact excused themselves over the post Rincewind was bound to. Rincewind sighed. That was the usual way of things. He looked at the dog. This one seemed to have more intelligence in its eyes than a dog should have. It was long, scrawny and fox-like, with long thin ears. Its eyes, however, were bright yellow. It sat and regarded him for a while, and hen said:-

"Looks like you're in a spot of bother, friend."

Rincewind smiled, grimly.

It's the end of a long day, I'm tired, hungry and tethered to a post. So I'm hallucinating, right? That you're talking to me. As if this is some sort of _vision quest_ or something."

"Could be, friend. Could be." the animal said, with a canine shrug. "Or I could be a God of these people. What do _you_ think?"

"Assuming I'm not imagining you, and you are a dog that can speak. You're not related to somebody called Gaspode, are you?" Rincewind said, suspiciously.

"Nah, mate, don't know any Gaspode. Round these parts they call me Coyote. **(3)** But I'll make it easier for you, Rincewind."

"Hah! Lucky guess!"

"You might remember when we last met?"

Coyote vanished, In his place was a large red-brown kangaroo, oddly incongruous in the central Howondalandian plain. A couple of late Indians ambled past, not giving it a second glance.

"G'Day, mate. The name's Scrappy. Or _was_ Scrappy."

"Oh, _no_!" moaned Rincewind. "Not _you_ again!"

The kangaroo preened its nose with a forepaw.

"The same! You know how it works, Rinso. You've met Gods before. Blind Io moves around a lot with seventy-nine different disguises doing all the lightning, right? The Goddess of Negotiable Affection works wonders with a selection of wigs and a Wonderbra? Me, I'm Scrappy on Fourecks. I'm Coyote here. I have to drag up in Llamedos and Hergen to be Morrigan, Goddess of Pissed-Off-Women. Same in Ephebe where I'm Errata. Then, you learn about drag on Fourecks and you pick up a few tricks, dont'cha? But on most of your home continent, I'm Hoki. Haven't you worked it out yet?"

"OK, so what do you want?"

"Bonzer, mate! You're willing to co-operate!. Well, it's like this. There's a war brewing. It could end up wiping out ninety per cent of the Indians if the white man ain't stopped here. I can't let it happen, as these people are my best believers. They're a banker, Rinso! Lose them and I drop a few rungs at Dunmanifestin. If they lose this fight, they're progressively wiped out over the next century by those joyless white Boor bastards with no sense of humour who don't believe in me."

The kangaroo became a coyote again.

"You're going to make sure these guys win a war, Rincewind. Trust me. I'll even get you back to your right time and place afterwards. "

"Can you get me off this pole?"

Coyote shook his head.

"No can do, old sport. The rules say I can't directly physically intervene. I can persuade a human to do it, though. Give me an hour or two!"

And Coyote sped off. Leaving Rincewind alone in the night.

_Great, _thought Rincewind, dangling dejectedly_. Another bloody mission. And things were working out so well at the University…_

* * *

**(1) – **refer to _**Eric**_

**(2) **See my novella _**The Graduation Class **_which discusses the education on offer to modern gels at the Assassins' School.

**(3)**Coyote is depicted here as the Trickster god of the north American Indians, as best described by trainee Yaqui shaman Carlos Castenada in his books about his apprenticeship to the elderly medicine man Don Juan.


	4. The powwow

_**Rincewind and the Redskins 4**_

Ridcully harrumphed, impatiently.

"What d'you _mean_, no trace of Rincewind anywhere? .He's got to be out there _somewhere_!" he demanded.

Ponder Stibbons, by now skilled at nursemaiding his Arch-chancellor, stepped in, placatingly.

"This is only a first search, Archchancellor." he said. "The next step is to refine the parameters and look more closely for anything we might have missed first time."

"I want him back, Stibbons. The Bursar estimates that you and Rincewind, between you, are currently doing ninety-five percent of the contact between Faculty and students. Bursar reckons he can cook the figures from that to put in front of the damn' Patrician to state we've vastly improved on delivery of teachin' . and we're meetin' the statistical targets that fella Pessimal set. "

Ridcully snorted his distaste for _performance targets_ and _league tables_, and said:-

"If nothin' else, if you _don't_ get him back, that means you're going to have a job to cover Rincewind's lecture schedule as well as your own, just to keep the numbers up!"

Stibbons winced. Ridcully, were he so minded, could teach Applied Threats to PhD level. (_Practice and Theory of_ _Applied Inducements With Integral Negative Reinforcement,_ to put it in academic language_)_

+++IF I MAY SPEAK, ARCHCHANCELLOR+++

"Go on, that machine"

+++I HAVE ONLY SEARCHED IN THE CURRENT TEMPORAL SPACE OF THE DISCWORLD AND HAVE FOUND NO TRACE OF RINCEWIND IN THE NOW, THAT IS, IN THE IMMEDIATE PHASE-SPACE CONTINUUM OF THE WORLD+++ HE MAY WELL HAVE BEEN TRANSLATED TO AN AS YET UNSPECIFIED POINT IN THE PAST OR FUTURE+++THAT WILL TAKE MORE RUN-TIME AND WORK TO ASCERTAIN+++

"But you can do it?"

+++YOU HAD BETTER HOPE RINCEWIND IS IN THE PAST+++ THIS IS LARGELY FIXED, PARADOX LOOPS AND DEAD-END STRIPS ASIDE+++ THE FUTURE, ON THE OTHER HAND, IS BY DEFINITION NOT ESTABLISHED AND EXISTS OVER AN INFINITY OF POSSIBILITIES+++THIS MAKES SEARCHING FOR A STRANDED WIZARD SLIGHTLY TRICKIER+++

"Hex", Stibbons hurriedly said, "If Rincewind has been hurled into the past or the future, then surely the Houser Theory applies?"

+++RUBBER-BAND HOUSER?+++ THE THEORY THAT STATES A PERSON OR OBJECT DISPLACED IN TIME IS AN ANOMALY AND WILL BE SNAPPED BACK TO THEIR OWN RIGHTFUL PLACE AS IF ATTACHED BY ELASTIC?+++ THIS MAY BE TRUE+++ BUT THE SUBJECTIVE TIME SPENT WAITING FOR THE ELASTIC TO GO "PING" AND RETURN THE ANOMALOUS ENTITY MAY BE UP TO SIXTY YEARS+++THERE IS NO WAY OF TELLING+++ I WILL SEARCH THE RECENT PAST OF THE DISCWORLD AND LOOK FOR EVIDENCE OF AN ANOMALY APPEARING WHICH MAY INDICATE THE PRESENCE OF RINCEWIND+++THIS WILL NECESSARILY TAKE UP TO NINETY PER CENT OF MY RUN-TIME FOR AN UNSPECIFIED PERIOD+++STAND BY+++

An hourglass on a spring slowly lowered and began to turn, lazily. Stibbons, who knew from experience that this was HEX's way of terminating a dialogue, said

"I'll have a relay of students keep an eye on things, sir. I'm just wondering if there might not be an easier way to locate Rincewind."

"Faster and easier than HEX, y'mean?"

"Yes, sir. What if we put a thaumic tracker on the Luggage? As sooner or later it's going to find him, wherever he is. It will then radiate a beam of magical particles back to a receptor station here. And we know they work across space and time."

Ridcully shook his head, doubtfully.

"Tricky things, them thaumic trackers."

"Yes sir, but that was only down to the purpose they were put to last time. If you recall, Professor Dexter-Ward, the Arkham Chair of Most Unwise Eldritch Studies, had the idea to use them to track shoggoth and tso-tso migration patterns through the Dungeon Dimensions…"

Both wizards removed their floppy hats for a moment in silent memory of a colleague.

"We never filled that Chair again, did we?" mused Ridcully. "Anyway, we get one of those onto Rincewind's blasted box-on-legs thing, it disappears into space-time lookin' for Rincewind, it finds him, HEX picks up the signal, and bingo!"

Ridcully paused.

"Just one thing, Stibbons. One little detail. How do we get the Lugggage to co-operate?"

_____________________________-

_{Hey you! Yes you, High Chief of the Cheyenne, Exalted in War, Pack Leader of the Dog Soldiers. Don't Bogart that peace-pipe, man! Pass it along!"}_

Bull looked at the circle of chiefs gathered in a circle round the fire, and nodded happily. Every so often, Dancing Weasel, who was tending the fire, would punctuate a wise word by surreptitiously throwing a handful of one of his special preparations into the flame, colouring it red or blue or green or bright flaring white. This had the desired effect on a gathering of tribal chiefs who were becoming more and more open to suggestions from the Gods as a laden peace-pipe circulated from the left, passing widdershins around the Circle.

_{This is some crazy shit, man!}_

_{We're guests of the Latoka, remember? They grow some pretty heavy shit! Chief of the Latoka always know where the best sensemilla grow!"}_

For now discernible reason that they could see, the central fire suddenly blossomed in rose-pink. The chief of the Comanches nudged his Kiowa peer. In the combination of shared vocabulary and hand-signals that passed for a lingua franca on the plains, he sighed and said

_{Heavy, dude!}_

_{Freaky light-show!}_

Chief Bull smiled, enigmatically. There was a little way to go yet before the Unforked Tongue, the Words of Truth, could emerge…

______________________________________-

In his command tent, General Jorg Kriminel set down the maps with a sigh. This expedition was not going as planned. Not at all. It had been a _political_ thing, right from the start: and political decisions rarely make for sound soldiering. Fair play to Blots, after all the upheavals of the last few years, he was getting on with building the Republic and assuaging the fears of its Morporkian-speaking half. He'd thrown out Ankh-Morpork's occupying army after a short war, then defeated their allies in the Morporkian Carp Colony, and was now saying to them that for the new state to work, it should not and must not be _just_ a Boor nation. The promise of expanding into the new veldt Hubwise of the jungle and woodland country, populated by only a few scattered red-skinned tribes, offered new lands to exploit, new farms to settle, renewed prosperity for new settlers and the victors of the war. Especially those Ankh-Morporkian soldiers, bitter and angry at the ineptitude of their leaders, who had been persuaded to desert to the new Republic with the promise of fair treatment. They had to be fitted in somewhere, with the chance of prosperity and land of their own they'd never have had at home.

_Thanks be their army was led by dunces like Eorle and Rust and not by Ramkin. He'd have fought a harder war. But Ramkin would have avoided war in the first place. He understood us. And now the last of the Ankh-Morporkian Empire is crumbling and falling. We hear they have had to concede Home Rule to Hergen. Llamedos will be next. And it began here, in Howondaland. **(**__**1)**_

The first step had been to get a foothold in the Hubward region, a sure and certain route to get men and troops in and then to reinforce and resupply them. Hard experience had told them that it wasn't possible – yet – to drive a military road through the jungle, a green Hell where its inhabitants, both black and red, delivered quick and unseen death, from a hundred different directions.

So they'd just bypassed it and established the military settlement of Fort Smith-Rhodes on the Rimwards coast, so as to unload men, horses and equipment by sea and send them inland, north of the jungle belt. This was how the expeditionary force of fifteen hundred infantry and six hundred cavalry had landed. Their mission to penetrate deep, explore, improve the blessed maps, assess the strength of the red man, and if necessary fight a battle or two with him to test his strength and learn his weaknesses. There were also civilians with them: map-makers, and prospectors, alert to signs of gold, silver, diamonds, other precious mineral resources of the Disc, that could be harvested in due time to enrich the expanded Staadt.

But all depended on the strength of the enemy they could expect to meet. And all the signs were that the enemy was being drawn back in front of them, a nomadic people gathering their strength, quite possibly with the intention of a single decisive battle. Those rag-tag Indians who'd thrown in their lot with the invader were sure of this. Kriminel was no politician, not in the same way that General Blots had turned out to be. But he was pretty sure that he should be at least _trying _to make local allies, getting some of the Indians on side, making the task easier. And the only Indians signalling any sort of acquiescence had been the damned Scalbies, a tribe shunned and loathed by all the rest. With damn good reason, from what he could see. The Indians selected totem animals for their tribes, didn't they? Eagles, horses, wolves, and so forth. What self-respecting Indian would choose the wretched scalbie? Or was it the case that the Scalbie **(2)** was the only creature that would accept being the totemic animal for such a tribe?

His supply columns were being harried in his rear by hostile Indians. He was a few days away from a conclusive battle, he was sure of it. He needed his cavalry close in, to scout, to patrol, to act as a threat in being.

And now that prize idiot Rjuister was proposing taking his cavalry – all his cavalry – off independently of the main body of infantrymen and support wagons. Thus, unless stamped on, leaving him blind and deaf in the face of a mounted and highly mobile enemy. _What the Hell was the man thinking of! Of course, he wants to be a General again. He's a bloody liability! _

He called a runner.

"Get this message to Colonel Rjuister, promptly. The verbal is : to avoid any misunderstanding, there is only _one_ General in this expedition. You are a Colonel. I am the General. _Follow my orders_.."

The messenger saluted, and hurried off.

_I've told him. I've made it explicitly clear. But will it be enough? _

_________________________--

"Who's he, then?" Grey-Maned Pony, the Chief of the Arapaho, asked Feathered Lance, Chief of the Comanche. He indicated an oddly-dressed individual, who was wearing a full suit of fringed tailored buckskins, including a tunic in the same material which made him stand out in an assembly of largely bare-torsoed men. The stranger's hair was also oddly styled: his head was almost completely shaved , leaving only a central crest of hair running front-to-back. The stranger had an indefinable air of sadness and dejection about him, and his regular tokes on the peace-pipe weren't helping.

"Oh, _him_" said the Comanche, indifferently. "He's chief of a tribe, alright. Only problem is, he's also the tribe. He's the Mohican Nation."

"What, all of it?" asked the Arapaho. The Comanche nodded.

"Sad story. We don't like to talk about it very much. But unless a Mohican woman walks out of the woods that's it, basically. Quits. Finito. End of."

The Arapaho nodded, sympathetically.

"Poor bastard".

The Mohican buried his head in his hands and appeared to start sobbing. The Comanche nudged the Arapaho.

"Something's happening."

The Talking Stick was circulating. It was a point of Indian etiquette that only the man holding the stick had the right to speak. It passed from Chief to Chief, all of whom considered it, but let it pass on, for now. Until it reached the chief of the coastal Pince-Nez Indians.

"You know they've only gone and built a bloody _town _on our lands? Right on top of one of our best fishing bays, lots of sheltered harbourage for fishing canoes. And they've built a bloody wall around it. I don't know about you, but I want it shifting. I don't remember any of those bloody white men asking for planning permission, for one thing. It's not in harmony with its environment, they're piling up crap like you wouldn't believe, that bloody army of theirs landed there, so it's a magnet for illegal immigration, there are any number of planning and customs infractions, and I want it **_stopping_**!"

He passed the stick on. There was a chorus of "Right!", "Yeah!" , "Right on!" and other approving comments.

"Makes sense" said the representative of the Iroquois Confederation. "I was baffled they'd appeared Hubwise of us so suddenly. If they'd tried coming through our woods again, _we'd_ have had'em, No bother!"

He paused, and added:-

"These people are _diseased. _Sick in the mind, even for whites. Some of our people went to their nation, invited to pow-wow with their great Chiefs in the place called Pratoria. There, the black-skinned people are slaves and the whites treat them with scorn and contempt. They have a God, called _Apart-heid_, who dictates to them that this is so. We red-skinned people were classified to be higher than the black but still lower than the white. We were _graded_ and _classified_ as "Coloured". They saw not _us_, but only the colour of our skins.

"Imagine our fate if they conquer our lands. Those of us who survive will be second-class citizens in our own lands. Slaves to the white man. Forever, with our freedoms but a dream."

He passed the talking stick on.

"So what do we do?" asked the Ogglala Sioux chief. **(3)**

"**_You_** can talk to your mum." the Iroquis said, nastily. "But I vote for war. Even now my people are attacking their supply wagons and raiding in their rear."

Chief Bull of the Latoka prepared a fresh pipe. Everything was going according to plan. Good.

_____________________________________-

Rincewind spent an uncomfortable night on his pole. He discovered that with application, he could at least lean on the pole to take the weight off his feet. He wondered what was going to happen to him. Where Scrappy the Coyote had gone. And above all, where the Hell his Luggage was. He was tired and hungry. But those were passing states that sleep and food would put right. He was also alive, which was a little bit less transitory and gave him thinking space for planning an escape.

There was a white army on the way? Interesting. Although in Rincewind's experience, getting away from one lot of armed men by running straight at the other lot of armed men could be counter-productive and lead to new reasons to be abjectly terrified. Best wait and find out what I can.

1903. The year just after the disastrous (from Ankh-Morpork's point of view) Boor War. Rincewind vaguely remembered the White Howondalandians had sent expeditions into hitherto unexplored parts of Howondaland with a view to spreading their state further. Something to do with creating common cause and common purpose, after a brief and nasty civil war, in which dominance of the State had passed from the Morporkian half of the country to the Boor half. Even the previous de facto rulers, the Smith-Rhodes family, had declined in importance and in many respects, had become Boor rather than Morporkian over the following decades. _Look at that girl who teaches at the Assassin's School, _Rincewind reflected._ Miss Smith-Rhodes. She's got the family name and all the respect that goes with it, but she's 100% Boor. _

Rincewind suddenly became aware he had visitors.

"'Ow do, mate" said One-Man-Bucket, lifting a gourd of water to Rincewind's lips. He drank deeply and thirstily.

"Cheers, Mr Bucket" Rincewind said, grateful for the kindness.

Bucket looked shiftier than usual, a typical Ankh-Morporkian street expression grafted onto a Latoka Indian face.

"Look, mate, I'd cut you down, if only I could. They just ain't decided what to do with you yet and if I presume, I could end up hanging on the next pole, know what I mean?"

"Understood." said Rincewind. "Look, what did those women want earlier, who were poking and prodding at me?"

Bucket, if anything, seemed shiftier than usual. He avoided the question. Rincewind noted this, and concluded the answer would not be one he'd be happy to hear. He cherished his ignorance, and didn't press the point.

"I've brung somebody with me. She wanted a look at you"

He indicated the old, round, dumpy, Indian woman, who grinned a very dirty knowing grin from a face looking like a happy prune.

"This is Anana Ogg, from the Ogglala tribe. Very important medicine woman. If she likes you, she'll have a word with her son and get you cut down, maybe even manage you some food and a place to get your head down. Her son's the Ogglala chief, y'see."

Rincewind smiled a very ingratriating smile, recognising a potential friend.

The old lady danced around him, observing him from all angles, whilst shaking two rattles and intoning a sonorous Indian song.

One-Man-Bucket winced.

"Ah, she's singing a song of great power and wisdom and magic, yes?" Rincewind asked, recognising "_Witch_" and following Rule One in these circumstances, which is "_Always be respectful to a witch. Respect costs nothing and ensures physical survival in a recognisably human form"._

"Well, no, not really. It's the one about the porcupine being the happiest of animals." He coughed. "Her totem animal, you see."

"Ah. Whatever might happen to other unwary animals will never, ever, happen to anything with lots of dangerous backward-pointing spikes, yes?"

"Heard it before, have you?"

Anana Ogg then took Rincewind by the cheeks and stared directly into his eyes. He felt his mind and memories being read. He wasn't happy that she burst into laughter immediately afterwards.

She spoke to Bucket, who nodded, respectfully.

"She tells me you're from a place as near to us but as unreachable as the back of a shadow. That you have yet to be born into this world, but the world has seen to it that you arrive at this place at this time. That you have a destiny to fulfil. This ain't making sense, you know. But she'll tell her son to tell the Bull to cut you free and make you a guest of the Sioux. That a help?"

Rincewind could have kissed the old woman. An end to this uncomfortable phase was in sight. All he had to do was hang on in there.

* * *

**(1)** This parallels Roundworld. Historians now agree the tipping point for the mighty British Empire was its humiliating near-defeat in the Boer War in South Africa (1899-1902). Many eyes were watching as the myth of British invulnerability was shattered. Home Rule was offered to Ireland in 1912. The country revolted in 1916 and again in 1921. By 1922, most of Ireland was a free state. In the Discworld, the Boors defeated Ankh-Morpork, This set off a chain-reaction, as little countries like Hergen and Llamedos took the chance to rebel, and dictate terms to a suddenly weakened Ankh-Morpork.

**(2) **The scalbie is a bird that… well, it is described in _**Small Gods**_. It is a bottom-feeding scavenger that is described as looking, all the time, like other birds do after meeting an oilslick. It is not a nice bird.

**(3) **The Ogglala were so called because uniquely among Plains Indians, they had Medicine Women, the hereditary Oggs, who advised the Chiefs (ie, told them what to do, or you'll get a right ding upside the earhole).


	5. HeWhoWashesTheWind

_**Rincewind and the Redskins – 5**_

As the first light of dawn stole over the horizon, the gathered chiefs, one after the other, repeated the single word.

"War." **(1)**

The Bull nodded his satisfaction, part of his mind dwelling on strategies for the coming battle, although most of it was concentrating on sitting upright and wondering about the possibilities for breakfast. After an all-night pow-wow, he always felt incredibly hungry, for some reason he'd never quite been able to fathom out.

As the host chief, he was first to stand and leave the circle. Dancing Weasel tapped his arm.

"There's this other thing to see to, guv'nor." he said. "Anana Ogg needs a quick word in your ear. She thinks she's got you your Wizard".

Although the sacred space of the pow-wow was male-only according to ancient custom and taboo, Anana Ogg breezed into it as if the rules applied to other people and not her.

"Wotcher, Bullshitter!" she said, affably. "You have _got_ to see this!"

"One of our scouting patrols brought him in, boss" said Weasel. "As luck would have it, you remember those two idiots from Ankh-Morpork? The brothers who thought they were coming back on holiday for a few months? Thought they could fit in a quick vision quest, and then go home again? They speak the heathen lingo and hey can talk to him."

"You can't help where you're born, Weasel!" said Anana Ogg, chiding him. "OK, so they can't ride, can't hunt, can't erect a tepee, can barely make a fire, can only work out which way round you hold a tomahawk on the second try, but their _hearts_ are Latoka. And that's what counts! And they bin sent here to us, now, for a purpose. You can count on that."

"Get me one of them." the Chief said, decisively. "What do you make of this Wizard, Great Ogg?"

"And you can leave out the _great-mother-cow-who-nurtures-her-nation _bit, OK? I'm too old for that!"

Bull noticed the other chiefs were listening in, intent.

"What do you make of this white medicine man, anyway?"

She shrugged.

"He's a _weird_ one, alright. His manitou is strange and twisted through a dozen different worlds at once. When I read him, right, I sees he's been to many places and walked among many peoples. Not willingly and not by his own choice, but the main thing is, he's walked thousands of miles in many pairs of moccasins, right? I also seen who his patron spirits are. _She Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken_ looks after him, probably 'cos he amuses her. And the other patron spirit who takes an interest is that bugger Coyote. Although he doesn't know Coyote as we know him, he's seen that bloody nuisance in other shapes and other skins, right? Between them two, they ain't half buggered his life up. Even the Black Buffalo don't know when he'll be able to take this lad, and that's odd, 'cos the bony old bugger is usually pretty definite about these things."

Bull winced at mention of the silent, black, skeletal God who ushered souls of the dead into the next worlds.

"Let's take a look at him".

___________________________________-

Ridcully and Stibbons stood either side of the Luggage, trying to communicate with it. It stood in mute bloody-mindedness, as if suffering them to come this close only with an effort. Stibbons braced himself to run. Ridculy leant oveer, with his usual maddening lack of fear and trepidation, and said

"Look, it's quite simple. We know you'll find him eventually. All we're askin' is that you carry a thaumic tracker, so that we can find both of you and bring you back. Now if you'll kindly open yer lid so I can drop it in..."

Stibbons held out the small black box encouragingly, feeling like a pet-owner who has just been assured by the vet (who doesn't have to do it) that getting a pill into a stubborn domestic animal is the easiest thing in the world, and like generations of cat-owners the Multiverse over is learning the hard way that if the animal doesn't want to take a pill, you're basically stuffed.

Ridcully carried on trying to use gentle persuasion, which for him was as difficult as Henry the Eighth trying to negotiate a marriage annulment without reaching for a handy executioner.

"Look here, old chap, we want him back. You're hard-wired to recognising that you serve Rincewind and your job is to make his life as easy and safe and comfortable as you can. Surely you can see, or feel or sense or intuit or whatever it is you do, that this makes it easier for him?"

The Luggage looked visibly uncertain. Ridcully seized the moment.

"And you know that wherever he is, he's likely to be in a place where he can't get _these_…" he brandished a sack of potatoes, triumphantly, "and these stop the fella goin' Bursar, right? So if you take these to him, you're fulfillin' your fundamental imperative, right?"

There was a pause. Then the Luggage's lid opened and it sat, expectantly.

Ridcully grinned and upended the sack of potatoes. Halfway through pouring them into the Luggage, he nodded at Stibbons, who stepped forward and dropped the thaumic tracker into the tuberous stream. Eventually the lid closed, and the Luggage glared at the two Wizards as if it suspected it had just been conned, in some indefinable way, but it was too much of a waste of its valuable time to take it up with you _now_, OK? It had things to do, but Gods help you if you've just put one over on me.

With a nod of its lid, it turned, and ran full-tilt in a rimwards and turnwise direction. Just before it hit the far wall of the High Energy Magic building, there was an octarine flash, and it disappeared.

Ridcully and Stibbons shook hands.

"Lesson to you, lad. You catch more monkeys if you bait the trap with honey. Now let's wait and see where it went, OK?"

They waited a few minutes. Then there was the familiar clicking and scratching from HEX's output. They leant over to read what was being written.

+++I AM RECEIVING SIGNALS FROM THE THAUMIC TRANSMITTER+++ RINCEWIND IS ON THE CENTRAL HOWONDALANDIAN PLAIN+++ IN THE YEAR 1903+++ A WAR IS IN PROGRESS AND HE IS ABOUT TO BE CRUCIAL TO THE OUTCOME OF A BATTLE+++ THE WHIM OF SEVERAL GODS IS INVOLVED+++

____________________________________-

Rincewind leant on his post, gloomily. A dog howled in the night. He wondered if it was Hoki, or Scrappy, or Coyote, or whatever he called himself on this continent. A tall dark figure passed, glanced at him, then did a double-take.

RINCEWIND? I DIDN'T EXPECT TO SEE YOU IN THIS TIME AND PLACE.

"Oh, hello" Rincewind muttered, wondering if this was a result of his being tired, exhausted, hallucinating, or whatever. He was reasonably sure he'd not received any mortal injury in the last few minutes, and he'd need to be a lot more tired than this to die of exhaustion, and One-Man-Bucket had seen to it he wouldn't die of thirst.

JUST A ROUTINE VISIT, RINCEWIND. I'M HERE TO ESCORT AN OLD WARRIOR TO THE HAPPY HUNTING GROUNDS. ALTHOUGH ALL THESE BLESSED TEPEES LOOK THE SAME TO ME.

Death shook his skull, and sighed.

THIS IS A BUGGER OF A PLACE TO WORK IN. SOME OF THEM EXPECT TO SEE ME AS A GIANT BLACK RAVEN. OTHERS EXPECT A GIANT BLACK BEAVER. THE LATOKA EXPECT TO SEE A SKELETAL BUFFALO WITH A BLACK MANE. SINCE THE COMMON DENOMINATOR IS THE COLOUR BLACK, I CAN ACCOMMODATE _THAT_, AT LEAST. LOOK, YOU HAVEN'T SEEN WAR AROUND HERE LATELY, HAVE YOU? WE'RE MEANT TO TEAM UP IN A FEW DAYS TIME. BIG JOB ON.

"Not since the Counterweight Continent, no." Rincewind said. He nodded towards Death's scythe.

"Look, you couldn't cut me down, could you?"

Death shook his head.

I RATHER BELIEVE YOUR CUTTING-DOWN IS IMMINENT. INCIDENTALLY, YOU AREN'T EVEN MEANT TO BE BORN FOR AT LEAST ANOTHER SIXTY YEARS, SO WHAT BRINGS YOU HERE?

"Magical accident at the university threw me back in time. I'm surprised you know who I am, incidentally? Shouldn't I be a stranger to you right now?"

OH, I KNOW YOU, ALRIGHT. THE WAY TIME PASSES FOR ME IS NOT AS LINEAR AS IT - NORMALLY – IS FOR YOU. THE NODES CAN SEND ME ANYWHEN. AH, WE HAVE VISITORS.

Anana Ogg walked up to Death and nodded, as between people who are familiar with each other.

"Just down there, Sonny Jim. Third tepee on the right. The one with the three rampant buffalo painted above the flap. Let me know when you're done, and I'll parcel him up for the funeral ground."

THANK YOU, MISTRESS OGG.

"You're welcome, Black Buffalo. Know this bloke, do you?"

OUR PATHS CROSS. FREQUENTLY. RINCEWIND IS AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE.

Death nodded at Rincewind, and stalked off to do his Duty.

Anana Ogg stood and looked at the Wizzard.

_{{So you know the Black Buffalo, do you? Interesting. You handle some strong medicine, my friend}}_

Rincewind politely let the unintelligible words pass over him.

He felt his bowels tremble as a dozen or so Indian chiefs, in bonnets and ceremonial headdress with many feathers, approached and stood in a half-circle, regarding him with inscrutable faces. He know these were important people who he had to impress. He just didn't know how to go about doing it.

He heard a familiar petulant whine, and turned his head to see One-Man-Bucket, evidently roused from sleep, being escorted by two warriors to the presence of the chiefs. He heard a brief conversation in the Latoka tongue.

_{{Doesn't look up to much, does he?}} _said the chief with the most feathers and the slightly glazed eyes.

_{{Like I say, there's strong medicine there. He conceals more than he reveals}}_ said the old lady.

_{{I should bloody well hope so!}} _said another Chief, who was promptly slapped round the ear by the old lady, knocking his bonnet slightly askew.

_{{Are you doubting my word, lad? 'Cos if you are, I'll knock you into the middle of next week! }}_

_{{Sorry, our mum!}}_

One-Man-Bucket addressed the Indian chiefs, speaking in the Latoka tongue. Then he turned to Rincewind.

"Just told them where you're from, friend. I've explained that there's a place of power where white medicine men go to learn and study and you were sent here from the University. Look, you don't need telling that these are important blokes, right? The Chiefs of the twelve tribes, you know? Impress them, and you're home and dry. If not, it's.."

"The Sun Dance. Right" Rincewind said, wearily. He heard a rushing of feet behind him. He saw the Chiefs stand back a pace and look at each other in consternation. Then he found himself flying through the air. Dazed, he and his pole hit the ground. He felt the shock of something crunching through the wood of the pole, and also through the hide rope that bound him. His hands suddenly freed, he sat up and tried to rub life back into his wrists, a cleanly cut length of hide dangling from each arm. Belatedly, he looked around.

"Oh, it's you." he said, to the Luggage. " I was wondering when you'd get here."

Chief Bull looked at Chief Flaming Lance.

"Did I just see that?" he asked, wondering if the holy herb was still at work.

"It's for real, Bull. I saw it too."

"So did I, Bull" confirmed Chief McSweeney **(2)** of the Choctaw.

"Give the white medicine man all he needs. Treat him as one of the Tribe. I'll talk to him later when my head's straighter." Bull said, and retreated hastily.

Rincewind, assisted to a tepee by One-Man-Bucket, fell onto a pile of animal skins and slept deeply and soundly. The Luggage stood guard and snapped at anyone who came too near. The new life of the Indian medicine man to be known as _{{He-Who-Washes-The-Wind}} _was about to begin.

* * *

**(1) **Although the High Chief of the Ojibwe actually said "This is serious shit, man. We got to waste the motherlovers before it gets heavy"

**(2)** A very long-established and honoured Indian clan.


	6. Te Living Wood

_**Rincewind and the redskins - 6**_

Rincewind awoke to a new day. He felt refreshed, although he was uncomfortably aware the animal skins he had fallen asleep on were…. well, a bit _whiffy…_ and contained a lot of lesser livestock, some of which had industriously migrated their homes and extended families to the inside of his wizarding robes.

Ah well, he'd had worse, and at least nobody was talking about killing him any more, which was a distinct improvement. He scratched, then got up and cautiously opened the flap of the tent. Nobody he knew was about, so he took a cautious stroll, looking for… yes, there it was. A smaller tepee behind the main one, which in accordance with the laws of universal humour and purpose-identification had a half-moon window cut out of the flap. Gratefully, he used the facility, and left feeling even more bucked up.

He met One-Man-Bucket, who nodded a morose good morning.

"What do people do for breakfast around here?" Rincewind inquired. Bucket shuddered.

"Anana's fixing something up. But don't hold your hopes up."

Rincewind found himself looking dubiously at two long strips of dried meat. They didn't seem any more appetising than the rawhide straps he'd lately been tied up with.

"_Pemmican_, friend. Or _biltong._ Dried buffalo meat. Apparently they can go a long time in between kills, and there's a lot of us out here."

Rincewind tried to chew the stuff, looking out over the sheer expanse of what now was not so much an Indian village as an Indian city. His gaze was caught by the toothless Anana Ogg, who was cheerfully sucking hers into submission. It was an arresting sight.

One-Man-Bucket sighed, gloomily.

"What I wouldn't give right now for a potato" he said. "Chips, for preference."

Rincewind sighed. This was, in one important respect, a man after his own heart.

"Chips are OK. But mashed. With a sprig of mint and rosemary. And a knob of butter melting into it."

The two men sighed and went into a shared reverie. Rincewind noticed the Luggage sidling up to him. If an item of travelling baggage could be said to look modest and smug at the same time, this summed up the Luggage at that moment.

"This your medicine pouch? Bloody big pouch!" observed One-Man-Bucket.

Then its lid opened. Revealing potatoes. Lots of potatoes.

"Cor, bloody hell!" breathed One-Man-Bucket, suddenly covetous. "Now _that's_ medicine!"

Anana Ogg paused in sucking her biltong, as Rincewind shovelled potatoes out onto the ground.

"Ask if she can get water. And start a fire. We need a pot!"

Bucket fired a steam of Latoka at the old lady, who grinned and went off to organise. Meanwhile, Rincewind picked something up. A small black cube, about eight inches on a side, with writing crayoned on it. The writing said

_Rincewind! Press button B. Stibbons._

Rincewind shrugged, and pressed the marked button. He heard familiar voices.

_-Is this dratted thing on, Stibbons? _followed by two loud drumming noises.

-_Try not to hit it like that, sir! And yes, it is on. _(pause)_ Rincewind. Listen carefully. We know where you are in time and space. We are going to rescue you. Stay calm and remember to replace this box in the Luggage. It's the tracking device we are using to locate you and hopefully pull you back to the University. It is vitally important that you replace it in the Luggage. Stay calm, and stand by for further instructions. Stibbons out. _

"Out _where_, exactly?" muttered Rincewind, replacing the tracker box in the Luggage.

Bucket and Anana Ogg nodded, appreciatively. Voices out of nowhere were heap big medicine.

"How would you like your potatoes, friend?" he inquired. Then he drew closer to Rincewind and asked

"I don't suppose your box can do firewater, can it? I'm dying for a decent drink!"(**1)**

______________________________________-

The advancing army column sent out cavalry patrols in front of it and out to its flanks, like spores from a virulent fungus. Captain Jeremy Quirke, commanding F Company on an extended reconnaissance, tapped his Scalbie Indian scout on the shoulder. Fastidiously wiping his hand on his trousers, he asked

"What's that on the horizon?"

"Latoka Sioux smoke signals, _kemo sabie_" said the Scalbie.

"Can you read them?"

The Scalbie went into a huddle with his tribe. This was slightly embarrassing: while most Indians were taught from birth to read smoke signals as a universal language, the Scalbie had evidently been nicking off school that day, and largely remained illiterate. Fortunately, a couple of scouts had acquired a smattering of smoke-language. They huddled, picking out the message in much the same painful way a troll can only read if he uses his index finger.

_{{No, no, that's short-puff before long-puff except after medium-length grey puff. Grammar, see?}}_

_{{Shut up, will you… C—O—M—E space B—A—C—K space T—O space M—A—I—N space C—A—M—P… B—G—H—O—R—N message repeats.. got it, we can tell old kemosabie now.}}_

Quirke, an arrogant officer with a reputation for bullying, was pleased.

"A general signal advising all scattered Indian clans to make their way to a main encampment on the Big Horn River, you say? And a replying signal from somewhere over there? So there's an Indian group on its way in? "

Quirke thumped his thigh in excitement.

"Send a signal back to the General, would you?" He had served alongside Rjuister for a long time and could not bring himself to call his commanding officer "Colonel".

"He might want to see action with us".

________________________________________-

Rincewind spent three almost-enjoyable days with the Indians. One of his few talents was a gift for languages: with Bucket, his brother Two-Dogs and Anana Ogg to teach him, he was soon able to communicate in a broken mixture of Morporkian and Latoka.

Two-dogs was doggedly, stubbornly, learning how to be a warrior: he spent most of his time in the saddle.**(2) **Something must have clicked, as he gradually fell off less and developed more confidence on a horse. One-Man-Bucket, on the other hand, remained a reluctant rider who spent as much time flat on the ground as he did on a pony.

Then Chief Bull turned up again.

"We want you to see this" he said. "Normally it's taboo and instant death for white man"

"Naturally" Rincewind said. He hadn't expected anything else.

"But in the circumstances…well, come on. And bring your medicine pouch with you."

"It normally brings itself"

The Indian chief nodded, and led the way. They walked through the encampment, past respectful and just inquisitive Indians, until the reached a clear space. In the middle was….

"Our totem pole. Very holy place, this".

Rincewind nodded, and looked up, There was something familiar about the wood… it had been carved, or shaped, at sometime into the likeness of totem animals. An eagle at the top, a wolf, a bear, a mountain lion a… weasel? And here, yes, a bloody coyote…

The coyote carved into the wood winked at Rincewind and said "G'day, Rinso, mate!" Rincewind didn't reply. Then Coyote appeared to step out of the carving.

"No worries, Rinso" he said. "You're the only one seeing this. Nice likeness of me, don't you think? _Very_ devotional. Anyway, art appreciation. May I draw your attention to _this_ part of the design?"

Rincewind followed where the God was indicating. Right at the bottom the animal that seemed to be effortlessly supporting all the rest was a porcupine, with a suspiciously Ogg-like look of dirty-minded insouciance on its face. And in its turn, it was sitting on…

Rincewind boggled. The base of the totem pole was a very regular, un-Indian looking rectangular block, with a smoothly rounded top. At its base, what might once have been roots gave the impression of hundreds of little legs along each long side…

"Oi. Coyote. Bugger off!." said Anana Ogg. "He's not the only one seein' you!"

"Grandmother Ogg." Coyote said, with smooth charm. "How nice to see you again. Will you explain, or shall I?" She glared at her God.

"Be my guest" Coyote said, and melted back into the pole. "I'll be around. Watching."

"That thing at the bottom's always been a bugger." Anana Ogg said. "It baffled us, I don't mind tellin' you. But now your medicine box has shown up, we believe a Moment of some sort is nigh. Signs and portents, that sort of stuff. " She nudged him.

"What's it doin'… oh my!"

The totem pole and the Luggage appeared to be aware of each other, in some indefinable way. In a manner Rincewind had last seen on some of the more ornate and powerful wizards' staffs, it appeared that all the carvings were crowding round on one side of the staff to regard the Luggage. As with wizards' staffs he'd known, it made his eyes water.

Chief Bull spoke. With assistance from One-Man-Bucket, Rincewind pieced together what was being said.

There had once been a tree standing there. A tree of power made out of the Living Wood, which Rincewind gathered was something over and above ordinary wood. Latoka had prayed and made offerings here for many moons of moons. One day, sensing the need of the Latoka, the Tree had sacrificed itself and shed its foliage, and the Great God _**Watan Tanka**_ had turned it into the totem pole they saw before them.

"Of course, there are some as won't leave well alone" Anana Ogg said, reflectively. "One of our artists come here once with a hammer and chisel, right, thinkin' he'd just tidy up and improve on some of the carvin's."

"Oh dear." Rincewind said. " Let me wonder out loud here. The moment he lifted the chisel, yes, there was a great big flash, and all they ever found of him were his moccasins.."

"With smoke signals comin' out of them. You got it."

"And what did the smoke signals say?"

She shrugged.

"Help, help, I've just been blasted into the netherworld without any moccasins?"

Rincewind looked at the totem pole again, And at the Luggage. And realised. _The Living Wood. _

"That totem pole is made out of sapient bloody pearwood!"

No wonder it and the Luggage were making friends…

Anana Ogg grinned and pushed Rincewind forward.

"Madam, I really must.."

The second push threw Rincewind up against the totem pole. He reflexively extended his hands to cushion his landing, and realised.

He was effectively holding onto a bloody great reservoir of natural magic. The largest wizard's staff in the world. And made out of sapient pearwood.

"Oh, shiiiiii……"

Rincewind felt his body filling with magic. His hair stood on end. His eyes bulged. But he was holding it…

He blanked out for a second, lying flat on the ground, then stood up, eyes blazing with new purpose. _But what the hell do I do with this magic? _

__________________________________________--

Colonel Rjuister himself rode out with Captain Quirke in pursuit of the Indian village. They found it….

________________________________________=

1 **(1) **As One-Man-Bucket was to learn later in life, never was a truer word spoken… see _**Reaper Man. **_

2 **(2) **Or rather the blanket, as Indians spurn saddles.


	7. Enter the trader

_**Rincewind and the Redskins – 7**_

_**Warning: this is necessarily darker than the preceding chapters (for plot reasons), but get through the not-nice bit and there's a big dollop of Rincewind and another old friend to look forward to. **_

The cart bumped across the uneven prairie, swaying gently and rhythmically in the light breeze, cutting a swathe through the tall grass. Its driver hummed a song as he drove on, a man at peace with the world and totally happy in his occupation.

_How – ow – wondaland! , where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain  
And the wind comes right behind the rain…..  
_

He saw the rising smoke, and frowned. It was too irregular, too black, to be any sort of smoke signal, unless it conveyed the most basic message of all – _{{Help! My tepee's on fire!}}_

He checked the grass. No, still green and wet. No risk of a prairie-fire, not yet. Too early in the season. But somebody was in trouble… he turned the horses towards the smoke and drove on.

_________________________________________-

The reason for the smoke was now a long way rimwards, making its way back to the army column.

"A good day's fighting, Captain Quirke, You are to be congratulated." said Colonel Rjuister.

"Thank you, sir." Quirke said, happy in the praise. Like Rjuister, Quirke could reckon his ancestry back to an Ankh-Morpork family. Remote cousins of his, in fact, served in the City Watch and the Regiments. Bullying, cruelty, malice and narrow-mindedness were Quirke family traits, as was a willingness to sacrifice others to their ambition and advancement.

"I'm sorry about Lieutenant Gibson, sir. I'm sure I can find a punishment detail for him"

The Colonel waved it off.

"A mere detail. I hope he can overcome his squeamishness for the greater battle ahead!"

Gibson, a newly-commissioned junior officer, coloured slightly. Behind them, a trooper snickered quietly.

Gibson felt like he wanted to die. Today had been the worst day of his life so far…

It had all began when the Scalbie scouts had reported an Indian village on the move, seeking to join the big gathering at the Little Big Horn. Quirke had sent a rider to Rjuister to report contact made, requesting permission to attack. Within half an hour, the General himself had ridden up with a small escort.

_And the Regimental Band? _Quirke wondered.

"I want to be a part of this, Captain Quirke. History is being made here! We are making these lands clean and safe for white settlers! It is the historical imperative!"

"Very good, sir" Quirke dutifully replied. The Scalbies, issued blue cavalry jackets to mark them down as loyal Indians who had accepted the New Order, fanned out in front.

"You will of course deploy your company as you see fit, Captain. I'm merely accompanying." Rjuister said, generously. Quirke nodded acknowledgement, and ordered his squadrons into line abreast. They trotted after the Indians until they saw it.

A loose caravan of Indians, their ponies each trailing a _travois _dragging after it, with their worldly goods wrapped up in buffalo skins tied to the trailing wooden frames.

Rjuister slapped his hand on his thigh with excitement.

Quirke, his mouth suddenly dry, ordered his bugler to sound the charge.

A hundred or so blue-coated cavalrymen unsheathed their sabres and spurred their horses on. Behind them, Rjuister nodded at the bandsmen…

As the flutes and drums launched into the regimental march _Barely Owin',_** (1)** the Indians realised the danger they were in. A scant thirty or so mounted warriors tried to put themselves in between the charging cavalrymen and the convoy of women, children and the old. A couple of Indians had elderly crossbows and sought to engage. Others had bows. Most of the shots went wide, but a trooper fell to earth with a final grunt.

_I owe for my bread and the clothes that I wear,_

_And I owe to the barber for cutting my hair, _

_The wage that I get doesn't go very far,_

_I'm tempted to half-inch the charity jar!_

_I fear that Death's the man I'll see_

_When the final bill, he'll take from me, _

_And when these debts are lifted from me,_

_Then I shall barely owin' be! _

The fight was brief and bloody and the Indian warriors were soon overcome. A couple of survivors attempted to run to the east, but were pursued by a half-squadron of bluecoats. A deathly still silence fell on the scene.

"Sir?" Quirke asked.

Rjuister looked as if he were in ecstacy.

"_Kill them all! All!"_ he shouted.

"The women? Even the children? "

"I said all, Captain! _Nits make lice_!"

Young Lieutenant Gibson, his sabre still bloody after fighting one of the warriors, turned away, sickened. Quirke, sensing an opportunity for malice and making himself look good, called him over.

"Order your men, lieutenant. You have been given orders."

"I will not. Sir."

Gibson saluted, and rode away, ignoring Quirke's furiously shouted orders for him to return. At least a few of his men followed him. But the rest… he knew the rest would ignore his order for them to stop, seeing that he had just had his authority undermined by his captain and colonel. But at least he could keep his own soul clean.

Eventually nothing stirred. Many troopers rode away with trophies. They'd heard Indians took scalps. And had indulged in a little pre-emptive atrocity. They drove away the captured horses and ponies, and left only bodies and flames. **(2)**

The Scalbie scouts, who had been looting the wrecked travoises for useful and valuable things, looked at each other and nodded. Some things sicken even scavengers. They had agreed on a course of action.

And two sets of frightened eyes looked out from the tall grass.

___________________________________________-

Anana Ogg looked up from the half-gourd of water she was concentrating on.

"Just bung your hand here, will you? I could do with better reception!"

Recognising that the old medicine woman was scrying, and glad to discharge a little of the raw magic stirring in him, Rincewind obliged. He rested a hand on the bowl and felt magic pulse out into it.

"See if I can find out what those white buggers are doing – present company excepted, of course. Find out how near they are. That's better! "

She and Rincewind watched the pictures in the dark water.

He watched her eyes narrow and her face darken as the massacre unfolded itself.

"Ugggh" said Rincewind.

"Even the KIDDIES!" she blazed. "What did they _ever_ do to _anyone_? I tell you, _[[He-Who-Washes-The-Wind}}, _that's not how Indians fight! Kill the men, yes, that's allowed in a fair fight, torture anyone you capture – I'm not saying that's right or wrong, it's just our way – but you give their women a chance, right? Tell them their men are dead, if you've got any brains you'll accept that and join our tribe, plenty brave warriors looking out for new wives. And you take their papooses and kiddies in and bring them up as your own! Good sense, that, more warriors and squaws, as well as it bein' the decent thing to do! But this! Is this how white men fight, mr Wizard?"

"Yes. With _these _white men."

She nodded.

"I'm off to tell the Bull!"

She stomped off, quivering with anger, full of purpose and intent, leaving Rincewind wondering what sort of bloodthirsty savage maniacs he was about to confront this time. At least when he did, he had an entire Indian nation behind him…

________________________________________-

The man in the cart took one look at the scene, retched, and looked for somewhere to vomit. There were too many bodies to bury, and in any case, he knew the Plains Indians practiced air-burial. **(3) **Maybe it was best to just leave them and move on… he muttered a general prayer in the direction of any Gods that might be listening, and returned to his cart.

The grass rustled to his left, making him jump. Then he realised it was a pair of Indian children, a boy and girl about eight and ten, terrified, faces wet with tears. But they seemed in no fear of him.

"Oh hell." he said. He also said: _{{Get in the cart and stay out of sight. If we see white soldiers, I'll do the talking, OK?}}_

With his new cargo, the trader snapped the whip and set off again, his cart dwindling to a dot on the wide grassy plain.

**_____________________________________________---**

Lieutenant Gibson was angry. The anger replaced the helpless impotent uselessness of the afternoon.

"So I failed to obey orders. Very well, then, sir. Take me before the General. Court-martial me."

He glared at Quirke, hoping he had the strength to face him down and call his bluff. At a court-martial, the circumstances of his refusal to obey orders would come out. And it wouldn't look good for Quirke. Or Rjuister.

He had the satisfaction of watching Quirke back down, eyes uncertain. Gibson felt nothing more would be said of his refusal to obey an illegal order. He saluted, about-turned and left the command tent.

Major Reno, no friend of Rjuister or Quirke, met him Gibson explained the afternoon's events. Reno nodded.

"Watch your back. Never let Quirke get behind you in a skirmish. You could sink him. He knows it. I'll try to get you transferred to my command where you'll be safest."

"Will the Colonel wear it?"

Reno grinned.

"The colonel is even as we speak being roasted by the General. The _real_ General. So he'll have more on his mind than a naughty subaltern. I think you'll find, in the Seventh, all the officers Rjuister can't stand end up being posted to my company. I look forward to seeing you there!"

The Major tipped his hat, and walked off.

________________________________________--

The cart lumbered on towards the distant pattern of spiralling smoke from many fires that marked the main Indian camp. He wasn't surprised to find himself intercepted by a group of mounted and warpainted braves.

As he was known here, he prided himself that he would be recognised and allowed to carry on.

At least, he _hoped _he would be recognised and allowed to carry on. After the massacre, white faces were going to be in low regard around here.

The warriors crowded round, looking unfriendly, lance-points levelled to his chest. The carter raised his right hand, palm out, in the universal gesture for "Peace" and said _{{Take me to the chiefs. I have news for them. It will grieve them, but they should hear truth spoken}}_

And then the two Indian children poked their heads out of the back . A rush of words followed. The warriors looked at each other. Then the lance-points dropped and the riders became an escort.

They led the cart and its driver to the heart of the camp, where he was indeed known. Anana Ogg took the two children into her care, and the cart's owner leapt down from the box to stretch himself, gratefully.

Regard the cart's driver. He is a white man, weatherbeaten by a life in the open air. He is small-to-medium built, in frontiersman's fringed buckskins and a beaverskin cap with a somewhat moth-eaten tail dangling down at the back. He has a furtive, somewhat rat-like expression.

He was instantly recognised by One-Man-Bucket, who forced his way to the front of the crowd.

"Oi, you bastard!" he roared. "I want a word with you about this bloody firewater you sold me!"

"Oh, yeah?" said the ratlike one. "What's wrong with it, chief?"

"I'll tell you what's bloody wrong with it! It's water, yes, but there's no bloody fire! I bin conned!"

"There's _some_ alcohol in there, chief. Best homeopathic sipping whiskey!" **(4)**

Rincewind watched, recognising something oddly familiar.

Chief Bear strode up. He was holding a crossbow. He did not look amused.

_{{Man-who-sells-crossbow-that-fire-backwards!}} _he said, holding it up as if it were a six-week dead fish.

"Got more of them in the cart for you, chiefy!" the trader said, mistaking the Indian's intent. "I'll take Klatchian dollars, Boor rand, Ankh-Morpork dollars if you got 'em, but no Hersheban dong, any gold you might have lying around, for this cartload of crossbows and tomahawks, come and get'em! Firewater for after the battle! Guaranteed vision quest with every bottle!"

Chief Bull thrust the crossbow at One-Man-Bucket. He turned it over and read:

"Hines Brothers, Ankh-Morpork. Manufactured 1860. The sticker underneath reads "UNSAFE FOR USE! CONDEMNED! Pratoria City Watch."

Bucket glared at the trader.

"Just what sort of crap are you trying to fob off on us, friend?"

The trader laughed, nervously. Rincewind couldn't hold it in any more. He stepped forward and said

"I'm betting, and I think it's a safe bet, your name is something like _Skin-Meself-Alive-Over-Three-Agonising-Days Dibbler, _am I not wrong?"

Skin- Meself- Alive Dibbler looked at Rincewind with respect.

"You wizards are getting better all the time, Arch-chancellor! Can I interest you in some mandrake root, got it fresh in?"

"No."

Rincewind sighed. Firewater with no fire, crossbows that either fired backwards and killed the man behind you, or else were so old and badly maintained that they disintegrated on cocking the string… classic Dibbler goods, wherever in the world you went.

But from what he'd seen in the scrying water, these people desperately needed better weapons. You might not want to invite Lakota Sioux round for Sunday lunch, but by the look of it, the people they were up against were even bigger bastards.

He sighed, and leant on Dibbler's cart, wondering what he could do to help… and then he glimpsed Coyote, winking at him from those glowing yellow eyes.

_Try a change spell, Rinso! _he heard inside his head.

Rincewind felt the magic surge up… he tried to visualise a cart full of clapped out condemned weaponry and bottles of flavoured water. What if the world and the possibilities inherent in it changed, just subtly, and just so far as to renew those crossbows and make them good as new… and while we're at it, a crate or two of Winkles' Old Peculiar would be good… and with all this magic slurping about, let's go for the best, a crate or two of the Macarbre…

Rincewind felt multicolour lights going off in his head. He spoke an unbidden syllable or two. The trader's cart was surrounded with an octarine glow.

"Bloody Norah!" he heard Dibbler say.

As the octarine glow faded, and Rincewind swayed with the effort and the orgasmic elation of performing real magic – or was the magic of the totem pole working through him? – Dibbler reached into the back of his cart. In one hand he pulled out a gleaming, new, perfectly functioning, crossbow. In the other was a bottle of the finest Bearhugger's Macabre Export.

He looked at both, one and then the other, disbelievingly.

Chief Bull pulled the crossbow from his hand, derisively throwing away the old broken-down model. One-Man-Bucket leapt forward and appropriated the whiskey, swiftly breaking the foil and uncorking it. He took a deep swig, wiped his mouth, and then threw back his head in a whooping Lakota ululation of pure joy.

Chief Bull and Dibbler looked into the back of the cart.

"Bloody hell! They're all like this!" Dibbler exclaimed.

He then assumed a calculating expression and looked at Bull.

"Going to have to charge you more? Premium stock?"

The Bull levelled the crossbow at him and cocked it. Dibbler swiftly allowed himself to be haggled downwards.

"OK, Chief, the usual price. And that's skinnin' meself alive painfully."

The Bull then registered something else.

_{{All firewater, and I MEAN all firewater, is to be stored in a safe place under armed guard till after the battle! I mean it! Nobody gets to commune with the Newt God Pistasarat until we've won! Victory feast, OK? Apart from you, Bucket, you've earned it.}}_

Later on, Rincewind and Dibbler found themselves eating dinner together from the trader's store of white man's food, to which the wizard added some gratefully received potatoes. And to Rincewind's gratification, there were bottles of Turbot's Old Peculiar. He'd never been a whiskey man. He studied the label closely, It looked old, archaic, a design from a long time ago. But probably current for 1903, he thought. He wondered where the beer and whiskey had come from. Ponder Stibbons would have a lot of alternative ideas on that: maybe the sheer power of the magic had teleported it from the nearest place where whiskey and beer could be found.

"Thanks." Dibbler said, sincerely. "I could still have talked my way out of it, but I'm not ungrateful for the help!"

Afte dinner, women of the tribe shyly presented themselves and showed off what to Rincewind's eyes were rather good native tapestries, picked out in beadwork and coloured thread, on some sort of soft supple leather. Dibbler was, it seemed, ready to accept the best in payment for a cartload of weapons.

"Always a market for these back at the fort" he reflected. Rincewind studied one. It was realy quite attractive, in its way. The leather was incredibly soft and supple and glowed a coppery-red colour. There were a couple of brown irregular patches on it, with a little knobbly bit in the centre of each, but then they'd been expertly worked into the design.

"Some sort of pigskin?" he asked Dibbler.

The trader looked shifty.

"Yeeaah.. some of the tribes do refer to Long Pig. It's not unknown."

"I've just not seen any pigs round here."

"Best if you just call it Long Pig."

Rincewind nodded, and set the tapestry on top of a pile of similar examples of needlework.

Then he recognised the girl: she'd been there on that first day, when that dried up old harridan had pulled his robes open and inspected him critically. She smiled at him.

"The Ladies' Sewing Circle?"

Dibbler nodded.

Rincewind went pale as his gibbering mind made the necessary association. He lifted the tapestry and held it to his chest, noting where the two brown irregularities in what he forced himself to call the leather fell, in relation to his own torso. The girl smiled and nodded.

_{{You've worked it out, then?}} _she said.

Rincewind nodded back.

"Mr Dibbler, I don't normally drink whiskey, but?"

"Help yourself" the trader nodded.

Rincewind helped himself. He found in circumstances like this, it helped.

* * *

**(1) **On Roundworld, the Irish air _**Garryowen, **_adopted by Army regiments the world over as a march. The British Light Brigade rode to their doom at Balaclava with the band playing this tune. It was, and remains, the regimental march of the US Army's Seventh Cavalry, even after Little Big Horn. Despite its association with two of the world's best-known military disasters and most incompetent generals. (Cardigan and Custer).

**(2) **At the Battle of Washita River in 1873, George Armstrong Custer is reported to have ordered the destruction of an Indian village - although he did relent and take some prisoners. The film _**Little Big Man**_ unfairly attributes a different massacre to Custer – the Sand Creek massacre of 1864, where a rabid Indian-hating loony called Colonel Chivington ordered total destruction of a Cheyenne village and the massacre of every living Indian in it. The slogan "_Nits make Lice_!" is attributed to Chivington. As popular story and a well-known film have transferred Chivington's guilt to Custer, I've used it here as a plot device to establish that Rjuister, like his rust forbears, is not a nice chap to know.

**(3) **The Plains Indians buried their dead in vultures, bald eagles and other scavenging birds.

**(4) **As has been pointed out elsewhere, homeopathic treatments rely on dilution for efficiency – the more dilute the solution, the stronger the effect. Dibblers have reckoned, therefore, that just being in the same room with a bottle of Homeopathic Sipping Whiskey should get you incapably drunk.


	8. Advance to contact

_**Rincewind and the Redskins – 8**_

Rincewind sat as inobtrusively as he could manage in the circle of chiefs and advisors. Anana Ogg gave him a great big wink and a thumbs-up, from where she was sitting with Dancing Weasel and a motley of other shamans, medicine men, and spiritual advisors.

In his tattered wizzarding robe, he felt out of place and unwilling to draw any more attention to himself than he had to. So he sat quietly, taking in the spectacle and trying to appreciate the subtleties of bonnet and beading and warpaint that distinguished, say, a Kiowa from a Cheyenne. This had to be an important meeting, he thought: there were no peace pipes circulating. Evidently they were after a quick decision this time.

He counted the chiefs. Bucket had said there were _twelve_ tribes, right? Something was odd and out of place, then, as he was almost sure he could count thirteen. As the chiefs talked on about tactics and strategy, he recounted them. Rincewind blinked. Still thirteen. But why was the thirteenth so hard to see, as if he was going in and out of focus?

Rincewind might not have been the greatest wizard on the Disc. He'd usually be the first to admit this. But some things, any wizard _knows_. He forced himself to look again, really look this time.

The thirteenth chief looked very strange, when you concentrated hard enough and studied all the little things that were out of place. But it was hard, as if… something was actively fighting being looked at too hard. Oh, he was_ dressed_ like an Indian, in fringed buckskin and beads with a bare chest and feathered bonnet, but it didn't _look_ authentic, as if he'd looked it up in a not-very-accurate book about the Plains Indians and had the kit made up from second-hand illustrations. It also looked too clean and lacked the ground-in grubbiness of hard wear and no laundries. His skin was white. Had nobody noticed? And he had a full beard and a handlebar moustache. In red. Among a people who were not able, for some reason, to grow facial hair. _And nobody had noticed? _

The thirteenth chief looked shifty for a moment, then identified Rincewind staring at him. He grinned.

"Rincething, isn't it? Haven't seen you since that scrap in Hunghung! You get around, don't you?"

"Oh, hi, War. You've not brought the kids this time?"

"Clancy was dead set to come. She always is, for cavalry battles. But you've got to think of their schoolin' first. Wife insisted and got her in at the Quirm Academy For Young Ladies. Advantage is, they allow gels to stable ponies there, so she's in her element!"

"Ah. The element in question, for young girls into ponies, being..."

"Something requirin' a large amount of work with a shovel, yes. "

War looked puzzled for a moment.

"Funny thing is, you can never get her to tidy her bedroom for love nor threats nor money. But give her a stable full of shit, a shovel and a wheelbarrow, and she's rollin' her sleeves up. Her mother was like that as a gel, apparently!"

"What's with the gear?" Rincewind asked, noting that time seemed to have slown and frozen around them..

War shrugged. "Just gettin' into character, old man. When you attend these little team-talks before the battle, you've got to blend in! Incidentally, have you seen old Mort anywhere? We're supposed to be teamin' up here!"

"He was here a night or two ago, looking for you." Rincewind said, helpfully, War harrumphed. Rincewind took a moment to reflect on just how much he had in common with Ridcully.

"Nodes have got screwed up again, then." War reflected. "Never could trust those damn things. Love to stick around, Rincething, but I've got an appointment at the other side's council of war. Can't be late!"

Just for a second, War shimmered and his outline became vague, then he re-appeared as a blue-uniformed cavalry officer with a yellow neckscarf. Then he vanished.

Rincewind sighed, noticed the meeting was breaking up, and wandered outside into the relatively fresher air. Perhaps it was the residual magic or perhaps his encounter with War had sensitised him, but something didn't feel right: if two of the Horsemen were here, surely the others weren't far away?

_Then again, war weakens a people. While you're fighting you can't get crops in. Invading armies are like locusts, they eat everything and give nothing back. So Famine necessarily arrives after War's been and gone, and they might just leave polite notes for each other. _"Hi, Famine. Have denuded several thousand square miles of all provisions, and the retreating Zlobenian army has declared a "scorched earth" policy and destroyed all growing crops to deny them to the Borogravians, so the civvies on both sides are reduced to eating grass. Down to you now, regards, War. See you in the next besieged city?"

_And then after Famine weakens them further, he leaves another handover note for Pestilence. And so it goes._

Lost in thought, Rincewind walked on to where War was just about to get onto his horse and ride off, completely ignored by passing Indians despite the fact he was now wearing a cavalry officer's uniform. War nodded to him, then paused and said

"Now what's _he_ up to…"

Rincewind followed the direction of War's glare, and spotted Pestilence, shiftily checking out the back of Dibbler's wagon.

Pestilence gave War a cheerful wave.

"_I've had this really good idea. You'll like it!" _he said, in a voice like every orally transmissible disease speaking all at once.

"_Let's say the Indians win the fight…"_

"I'm sayin' nothing!" War declared, folding his arms.

"…_but if they do, right? There's a fort and a trading station on the coast. What if I whisper in the right ears that this Dibbler chap could be sold a lot of really, really, cheap blankets to sell on to the Indians, no questions asked? And what if the blankets had last been used on a smallpox ward, or some other infectious disease, and haven't been properly washed, if at all?" _

Pestilence nudged War in the ribs. War pointedly stepped away.

"_What do you think? It'll be a killer!"_**(1)**

War scowled. "Bloody unsporting and devious and underhand, if you ask me! But hate it though I do, it's your department, and I can't stop you, I suppose."

Rincewind walked away to find Dibbler, leaving the two Horsemen squabbling.

The trader looked up, oblivious to the psychic disturbance going on at the back of his wagon.

"What's up, Arch-chancellor?" he asked.

"Tip for you." Rincewind said. "I've just heard there's a plan on to get you to carry poisoned blankets to the Indians. When you get back to the fort, right, you'll be offered a wagonload of blankets at a suspiciously low price. Whatever you do, get them washed and disinfected. They'll have come off a smallpox ward, that's why they're cheap. Whoever's flogging them will want you to infect the Indians."

Dibbler nodded.

"And I'll have them in the back of me wagon for a month. I might even sleep in one at night. I've never had smallpox, and I don't want to start now! Thanks for the tip!"

"Don't mention it. I got it from a very good contact."

__________________________________________---

Lieutenant Gibson still felt as if some sort of doom, some sort of black cloud, was hovering over the cavalry. He could feel it, an oppressive weight in the air like the high, humid, almost intolerable air pressure just before a really big thunderstorm. Aware that this is not a way for an army officer to behave, he sighed and went about his duties. He was aware of Top-Sergeant Williams haranguing and lambasting those of his troop who had participated in the massacre, ruthlessly re-asserting normal discipline among the men. Williams, an experienced NCO, was reminding the Troop that whilst refusing an order given by the Colonel might make things uncomfortable, the Colonel dwelt a longer way up the chain of command and wasn't present all the time and watching you like a hawk in the way he, Williams, was. So if you boys gets what you suspects is an illegal order, what I _knows_ to be an illegal order, you has a choice. Not a nice choice, but still a choice. You obeys the illegal order and you pleases the officer who gives it. But then, you annoys _me_, and I am _nearer_. And I can make your lives Hell in a thousand inventive and creative ways, lovely boys. I has been in this man's Army for long enough to earn my three stripes down and my three stripes up and I knows many, many, things. Now for the good of your souls we is about to repeat the punishment drill – again!

Gibson smiled. The old Llamedosian NCO could be relied on to enforce discipline. He walked on to the informal officer's conference. The _very_ informal officers' conference.

Major Reno and Captain Bentine welcomed him warmly. Gibson declined an alcoholic drink, choosing only water, reflecting that service under a commander like Rjuister drove middle-ranking officers to drink. He liked Bentine, an over-age captain with a wry and unique sense of humour that burst out at inopportune moments. Gibson guessed this was another compensatory mechanism that kept him more-or-less sane in dealing with the malevolent idiot Rjuister, whose latest brainwave involved a full-dress parade, as if they were back in barracks practicing dressage on the parade square.

"It's a square world, alright." Bentine reflected, sipping what looked like a Quirmian brandy.

"As you say, Michael" Reno agreed. "I'll have another go at persuading him that full-dress parades are a dangerous distraction while on active service. I mean, who the hell are we trying to impress here? It's highly likely we'll be fighting a battle in the next day or two!"

"Totally potty," Bentine agreed. **(2)**

"They say he's related to the Rusts of Ankh-Morpork." Reno mused. "That would explain a lot."

"It's also a warning." Bentine suggested. "Look at the sort of casualty lists the Rusts clock up. How do we stop ourselves from being part of a glorious Rust battle?"

Reno nodded.

"All the signs are that this is going to be a bloody unmitigated disaster. It's _political_, for one thing. And politics do not make for good soldiering. The priorities are too different. For one thing, that bloody maniac Verkrampt back at the fort. Look at the way he's alienating Indians who might otherwise be loyal, or at least friendly, by imposing the pass laws and segregation."

They nodded: Liutnant Verkrampt might only be a lowly Liutnant, but he belonged to BOSS, the feared Bureau of State Security, an agency charged with maintaining the security of the Boor Staadt and enforcing those laws concerning the supremacy of the white race. Technically he was only an _advisor _to Governor van Heerden: but this sort of advisor accumulated an unhealthy, malignant, degree of power, especially when advising an inept imbecile who was only nominally in charge of what Pratoria hoped would be its newest colony. **(3)**

"And out here, we're being drawn further and further out, with the Indians refusing battle and retreating in front of us, with our supply lines being pulled further and further from our base.

"That's _dangerous._ We already know our supply convoys are being attacked in our rear and only half of the equipment and food we need is getting to us. The General's had to shed nearly a thousand men – and the whole of the Second Cavalry - to defend the supply convoys from attack and secure the lines of communication. Which leaves us weaker out here.

"And in the meantime, there is an enemy, as yet not brought to battle, who is gathering his full strength ahead of us, and is no doubt seeking to engage us on a battlefield of his own choosing."

Reno sighed.

"We were told that this country has a hodgepodge of scattered tribes, who have spent so much time fighting each other that they'd never be able to co-ordinate an effective response, and we could defeat them piecemeal. Well, they seem to have heard about our lovely political system, and seen the wonderful advertisement for it that Verkrampt has given them, and the _coloured races_ have decided they want no part of it. Gentlemen, we have given them a lot of good reasons to unite against us. And _somebody_ on their side is co-ordinating a lovely strategy!"

The three officers sat in gloomy silence, hearing the bark of orders and the thundering of hooves as the men were set to training exercises and normal camp duties.

"We're going to get _slaughtered,_ aren't we?" Bentine asked. The other two nodded, somberly.

"Not if I can help it." Reno said, firmly. "As I see it, our duty is to get as many men out alive as we can from an almost inevitable defeat. All the signs are there. Rjuister's going to go galloping in with the whole regiment against what looks to be heavy odds. I would not trust the Scalbie scouts. I think they're about to wake up and realise they're Indian. Incompetent leader, vastly outnumbered by an ably-led enemy, scouts who I believe will turn their coats at the earliest convenient opportunity, a supply problem that's only going to get worse… we need a strategy of our own. Any ideas?"

____________________________________---

Rincewind was aware, also, of a thawing of relations with the older of the twins, Two-Dogs. The morning after the firewater, Dogs had pulled Rincewind aside for a quiet word.

"Listen, I'm worried for our kid." Dogs had said. "Our mum said to me to look after him. And, well, I'm worried about the way he hits the firewater. He's got too much of a taste for it."

Rincewind nodded, thoughtfully. He recollected what had been said about Commander Vimes of the Watch.

"I've noticed too. How glum he is when he can't get the stuff. Perhaps he's, you know, just normally far more sober than the rest of us. Some people are. They need a couple of big drinks just to catch up."

"You might be right." Dogs had said. "But it don't stop there. It worries me."

Rincewind also remembered a comment in one of the Library's books on the Indian peoples. He paraphrased it for Dogs.

"It's said by people who've studied these things that Indians are far more susceptible to alcohol than a lot of other peoples. It comes from being one of the few races on the Disc who've never bothered with booze and, one or two exceptions aside, have spent thousands of years not drinking the stuff. Then all of a sudden the whole history of brewing and distilling catches up with you, and you've got no tolerance for it."

Dogs nodded.

"I hear the Iroquis do a sort of beer, back in the forests. And way over in the desert, the Yaqui discovered what you can do with tequitl cactus and basic distillation. But here, you're right, the Plains Indians never got the knack. No wonder Bull wanted all the firewater locked up! Never touched the stuff, meself. My philosophy's always been, if you can set light to it, what are you doing drinking it? But try tellin' that to Bucket."

He got up to leave.

"Thanks for the chat, Mr Rincewind."

Rincewind noticed one of the Indian girls, shyly giggling in the background. Dogs grinned and took her arm.

"This is _{{Small Damson Or Perhaps A Quince}}". _he said. He smiled, slightly embarrassed.

"There might be reasons to stay on for a while. You know, when the fighting's over."

Rincewind nodded, appreciatively. The Indian girl, rounded, slightly dumpy, but quite pretty, really did look like a Little Plum. **(4)**

* * *

**(1) **This was deliberately done as a means of decimating the Indian population through disease. An early example of germ warfare.

**(2) **It's an odd coincidence that one of Custer's officers shared a name with comedian Michael Bentine, a co-founder of the Goon Show comic troupe who revolutionised British radio comedy in the 1950's, and whose influence can be read in just about every British comedy act of the following forty years. Bentine was only a Goon for the first couple of years of the show's run – he left following acrimonious disagreements with co-founder Spike Milligan, and pursued a television career of his own. His TV comedy series, .dependent on innovative visual humour and Python-like sketches, were called "**It's a Square World**" and "**Potty Time**". While Bentine was half-Peruvian by parentage, it is not thought likely that he was related to Custer's officer – wrong end of America. But in a square world, any lunacy could happen…

**(3) **I'm trying to keep the political background to a minimum. But with "South Africa" having to stand in for the "United States" in this story, (Terry Pratchett having deliberately omitted a USA from the Discworld) it has to be there, and internally consistent, and necessarily _different_ from that prevailing in the USA in the 1870's. It has to be right for the time, the people, the place and the story. In Tom Sharpe's extremely funny **Piemburg **farces, comic novels set in the apartheid South Africa, van Heerden is the grossly incompetent police chief, alternately bamboozled and terrified by the certifiably insane political officer Liutnant Verkrampt, a paranoid secret agent who sees Communism and black rebellion everywhere. Verkrampt is also poisonously racist and has a lot in common with Captain Findthee Swing on the Discworld. It is possible Terry based aspects of Swing on Tom Sharpe's insane South African secret policeman…

**(4) **Another "can't resist". In long-running British childrens' comic _**The Dandy, **_a long-standing character is the Indian Little Plum. OK, so he's male in the comic…


	9. The War Party

_**Rincewind among the Redskins 9**_

Rincewind felt hot rivulets of sweat flowing down his back. And down his front. And down everywhere else. He felt bodies wriggling in the pitch dark and heard sighs and grunts of contented pleasure.

He shuddered. The smell inside the sweat lodge was indescribable and even made Ankh-Morpork in July seem like a rose garden in bloom. And the heat was making his head swim. Not for the first time, he wondered what people saw in this sort of thing. He'd have avoided this, were it not for One-Man-Bucket nudging him urgently and saying that an invitation to the Chief's sweat lodge was a high honour and it was seriously impolite to refuse.

Therefore Rincewind found himself jammed into a hot small space with up to eighty Indians, none of whom were in a hurry to get out. He could make a guess as to some of the conversations going on around him.

_Isn't it great to have a place to go, away from the nagging squaw and the papooses?_

_You should hear mine, matey. Jerboa, jerboa, jerboa__1__._**(1)**_ All bleedin' day. Never shuts up. Should have named her Cannot-Give-It-A-Rest-Woman, or Lady Yak-Yak-Yak_

Rincewind knew that back in Ankh-Morpork, there were some peculiar groups who claimed to want to reclaim their essential masculinity by running naked in the woods, or beating drums, or building sweat lodges. He wanted no part of that. He'd also been to places near the Hub, where the locals, friendly well-built blonde people, had similar set-ups that they called a _sauna. _Following local custom, he had been alternately baked and boiled, consternated and goggled at realising they weren't _men-only, _misinterpreted what a buxom friendly blonde called Meilikke had wanted to do with a bundle of birch twigs (although in his defence he hadn't really been looking at the twigs), and finally deep-frozen, in a heart-stoppingly cold plunge pool. And then he'd been expected to roll naked in the snow…

_And people do that for pleasure? _He thought, in the dank disgusting dark.

But finally it was all over, and Chief Bull's leaving the Lodge was the cue for the other Indians to depart. As they left, Rincewind gratefully sucking in lungfuls of cold outside air, the medicine man Dancing Weasel prodded at them with burnt twigs, for some reason, whilst chanting a toneless song.

Like some others, Rincewind ran to the nearby river for cool relief and to wash the rank sweat off. But he was now enjoying that after-sauna feeling: utter relief that it was all over, combined with a sneaking suspicion that maybe these Hublanders/Red Indians have got something right, as you've never felt so deep-down_ clean_…

He swum in the river for a while, enjoying the quiet and calm, and then returned to retrieve his clothes. Grinning wickedly, Anana Ogg passed him a bundle of clothing. His wizarding hat was there, but a band of braided material had been sewn around the base of the cone. His trousers had had lengths of buckskin braid stitched down either outer seam. His wizarding robe did not seem to have been interfered with. He shrugged and dressed.

____________________________________--

Later in the day, Two-Dogs took him to see Bull.

The chief looked hazily up from his meditations with the ever-present peace pipe.

_Greetings, He-Who-Washes-The-Wind. I'm pleased to be able to say we've found you a place in the next war party. Just get Anana to apply a little warpaint, then pick up your weapons and your pony, and report to Crazy Horse, would you? That medicine of yours should give the white-eyes something to think about!_

Rincewind turned to run, but saw two of the largest Indians he had ever seen standing immediately behind him with folded arms. He sighed, and allowed himself to be escorted to Anana Ogg, who was busily applying battle-slap to the warriors.

"A sort of dark maroon-red goes best with my eyes," he said. "I learnt a few tricks about make-up in Fourecks. Just ask me, if you're in any doubt at all."

Remembering Letitia, Darlene and Neilette, Rincewind tried to take editorial control of his makeup job, but was given much the same horizontal striping of blue and off-white that everyone else was receiving, in much the same way that a barber who knows his job will just glance at the picture of the film star the hopeful customer wants to look like, and then deliver an identikit short-back-and-sides.

"Look, somebody who knew her stuff once said I should have a bit of a tint on the beard?" he said, hopefully, and was ignored.

Disgruntled, he noticed that even the horses were painted up, in spots and stripes of various colours. He looked down… yes, the Luggage was sporting a similar paint job. He wasn't surprised.

"Hold onto this, mr Rincewind," said Two-Dogs, passing him a short stick with a knob at one end.

Rincewind held it like a six-week-old Dibbler sausage.

"What am I meant to do with this?" he asked.

"It's a coup-stick, Mr Rincewind. The idea is, you gain status and warrior courage by riding up so close to an enemy that you can touch him with it."

Rincewind experimentally hefted it and swung the stick.

"What, you touch them very very hard over the back of the head with it?"

"No, Mr Rincewind, you just _touch_ them. Then you ride off again."

"So Indian warfare is like playing tag?" Rincewind said, disbelievingly.

"It's apparently symbolic, mr Rincewind. It's a sort of play-warfare that stops the tribes from seriously killing each other."

Two-Dogs paused, listened to what he was saying, and looked puzzled as his words caught up with him.

"But, hold on, aren't we up against white men who are actually trying to _kill _you, and who _aren't _constrained by a ritual system of almost-warfare, evolved over the centuries to resolve disagreements between tribes by actively preventing un-necessary bloodshed that would catastrophically weaken the tribal and social structures? I mean, this is for real, right, and not symbolic."

"There's a bit of a flaw there, I'll admit, Mr Rincewind. I'll have a word with Crazy Horse. He's in charge."

Rincewind sighed and looked over the ponies. A dun spotted palamino – or it might have been a roan, or even a mustang – looked back at him with very intelligent yellow eyes. One eye winked at him.

"G'day, Rinso. Remember Fourecks?"

"Oh, _you_ again." Rincewind said, repressing a shudder at the memory of the horse-ride Scrappy had provided for him in Fourecks.

The horse trotted forward.

"Hop aboard, Rinso. I'll get you through this in one piece, no worries. Trust me!"

Rincewind sighed, and mounted up. Around him, the war party readied itself.

Crazy Horse turned out to be an Indian who lived up to his name, a perpetually twitching, thin, individual with the sort of far-away eyes that focused on a spot somewhere just beyond your left ear. Rincewind wasn't surprised to see his warpaint incorporated a red star painted on his brow. He'd seen that before, a long time ago. _And they make this man a leader? _he thought. _Then again, look at the sort of people we choose - or who choose themselves – to lead our armies. Lord Rust, for instance. He's a different sort of red-star-on-forehead, left-ear-staring person, living in his own reality. One that touches everybody else's now and again, but only coincidentally._

Crazy Horse simply blanked Rincewind when he raised his worry about the counting-coup business, muttering something the wizard couldn't catch., and riding off._ Just like bloody Rust, _he thought.

The Indian who was second-in-command, with less feathers in his bonnet, seemed to have a better grasp of things. But then, seconds-in-command generally did. He nodded apologetically at Rincewind, and introduced himself as Spinning Wheel.

_He'll learn, He-Who-Washes-The-Wind. Even if it takes a lot of blood, sweat and tears. All we can do is ride these painted ponies and hope he gets the idea quick. Talk about our troubles, eh?_

_It's a crying sin, I agree!_

_Just ride our painted ponies and let the Gods spin the wheel!__2_**(2)**

And so the war party rode off. The Luggage tried gamely to keep up, but was soon outpaced. It shrugged its lid, and returned to the camp to Anana Ogg's tepee.

Rincewind was pleasantly surprised that he wasn't falling off and that Scrappy/Coyote/Hoki wasn't trying to be anything other than a normally functioning pony, albeit one with a vested interest in not throwing its rider. He felt nicely anonymous in the middle of a war-party of just over a hundred braves, and relaxed to enjoy the ride.

And then the whooping and war-crying around him rose to a new pitch as they sighted the cavalry patrol, of perhaps thirty or so bluecoats.

At sight of the Indians, the bluecoats spurred themselves into a gallop, guidon flying, and officer pointing them in a direction that took them away from a convergence course with the Indians.

However, Spinning Wheel had peeled off with half the warband, and the lighter, faster, Indians were not only gaining but looked likely to outpace the white cavalrymen. Rincewind, despite his bowels knotting in a way that would have done credit to a Boy Scout, found himself caught up in the thundering exhilaration of the chase.

After fifteen minutes of exhilarating chase, the cavalrymen were cornered. Their horses, which carried a heavier load, were blown and panting after the desperate gallop, while the smaller, far lighter, Indian ponies still had speed and stamina. A bugle call sounded, and the horse soldiers formed a desperate circle, slowing to a trot, unslinging horse-bows. The Indian riders whooped and circled them.

_Poor bastards haven't got a hope_, thought Rincewind._ Soften them up with arrows, then one swift charge…_

Then, to his surprise and horror, Crazy Horse sat up in the saddle and called

_"Ride forward, brothers! One at a time! Count coup! For your glory as warriors and the Great Spirit of our people!"_

It was patently bloody obvious the white men had never heard of the custom of counting coup, as the first Indian to try was shot out of the saddle as soon as he was within crossbow range. The second got near enough, while the troopers were reloading, to actually touch one of the troopers, who flinched, caught while desperately trying to reload, expecting death. Instead, he got a light tap on the shoulder, from an Indian who whooped in triumph - and then turned to ride off. A crossbow bolt caught him in the back some seconds later.

Rincewind winced and turned his head, seeing two more riders nearby. For some reason, the Indians had made a nice big empty space for them, although he doubted they were consciously aware of this.

"Bloody sickening, isn't it, Rincething?" boomed War. "If they don't buck their ideas up sharpish, this is going to be worse than anything that bloody idiot Rust could ever manage! Never known a fella for pullin' inglorious defeat out of the jaws of victory. Until now, that is. Wonder if this Crazy Horse chap could be related?"

EXCUSE ME A MOMENT, said Death, and he and Binky winked out of sight for a second. Then they were back. I'M AFRAID I'LL BE DOING THIS A LOT FOR THE NEXT TEN OR FIFTEEN MINUTES OR SO. BY THE WAY, HELLO, RINCEWIND.

"I see the two of you managed to meet up, then." Rincewind said, weakly.

AT A TIME LIKE THIS, IT IS MANDATORY. EXCUSE ME AGAIN.

Another Indian fell from the saddle. Rincewind rode forward.

"Look, you're being cheesed!" he bellowed at Crazy Horse. "Isn't it obvious what you should do? Let 'em get a good volley off, discharge all their crossbows at once, then hit them with weight of numbers? While you've still GOT weight of numbers?"

Crazy Horse continued to ignore him.

War shouted, in a carrying voice

"Hoki, you useless bastard! DO somethin'! You're the only God round here, you sorry idle bloody article!"

Scrappy rolled a yellow eye.

"Strike a bleedin' light. Everyone's a critic. Hold on tight, Rinso!"

The yellow-eyed horse went from a canter to a gallop and then to whatever the next speed would be for horses, were there one.

Rincewind was pulled forward with a despairing Dopplering cry of _"OhshitohshitohshitI'm going to die!" _as the cavalry line drew nearer and nearer. He thrust out the arm with the coup-stick to try and maintain balance as crossbow bolts zinged past him.

Rincewind felt the coup-stick bounce off first one soldier, then another, then another, in a series of bone-jarring impacts. Then as he passed through the thin blue line and could just glimpse the surprised-looking young officer trying to direct the battle, Scrappy/Coyote pulled up to a dead halt and sent the wizard flying forward over his mane.

"What the…"

"Time for you to meet some new people, Rinso! Make new friends! Trust me, I know what I'm doing!"

Then Coyote galloped off and disappeared.

Rincewind heard, in the distance, the Indians adopting a new war cry of

Ohshitohshitohshit!" as they charged. Then a massive trooper leapt for him, a knife clasped in his right hand and a villainous look on his face. Rincewind, terrified, grabbed the knife wrist and he and the trooper rolled about in a struggle that put the wizard underneath. Rincewind wriggled to his left as the knife came down into the earth on his right side.

"Stop! Don't kill me! I'm a white man!"

He wriggled to the right as he knife came down to his left side and stuck in the earth.

"_Ek is 'n blanke! nie vermoor my! ...__!_ " he screamed, remembering the nationality of the opposing army and praying he hadn't mangled the Kerrigian too much. "I'm white! I'm a white man!"

The mounted officer looked down and did a double-take.

"Er… trooper Els? He's white. Just tie his hands, would you, for now?"

The ugly looking cavalryman nodded, and sheathed his knife.

The officer added, with an unfriendly scowl:

"Dead men can't answer questions. I want to know what he was doing, riding with the redskins."

_Ah, _thought Rincewind_. Back to normal, then. Threats and tied hands. I know where I am with those._

Incredibly, the attack was slackening off, although gaps had been torn in the cavalry line.

"They almost had us," the officer mused. "But they seem to have lost heart. I wonder why?"

The Indians regrouped and rode away.

_They aren't even trying to rescue me! Ungrateful sods! _

Rincewind sighed, and reconciled himself to being a captive again. This time, hands and feet bound, he found himself thrown over the saddle of an otherwise riderless horse as the remnants of an extremely mauled cavalry patrol returned to their _laager._

Beside him, the cavalryman called Els rode, stroking his knife, and making threatening remarks in heavily accented Morporkian about what he'd _really_ like to do to white turncoats who threw their lot in with those verdammte red keffirs. _Men, you ere worrrse then the blecks!_ Rincewind believed him: he knew old-time Boors were a bunch with some pretty odd ideas about _racial purity. _Besides, he could see the long greasy increasingly fly-blown hanks of mainly-hair hanging off Els' saddle-bow_. _He'd seen the massacre in Anana Ogg's scrying glass, and grasped that the men responsible were not the sort of rough friendly soldiery you could enjoy a social drink with.

Rincewind used the time to prepare his cover story. He thought he'd need a good one.

______________________________

Meanwhile, Chief Bull and Anana Ogg received the report back form the war party. The Chief smiled. The God Coyote had been pretty definite about his wish, that the unlucky and foully-starred white medicine man be delivered to the camp of the enemy whites, where, trust me, he will speak with forked tongue and persuade their chief to ride out too far and destroy himself. Coyote had revealed it to Anana in a Vision, and she had nodded and said "Then it must be".

The chief sighed. He'd liked the white medicine man, in a funny sort of way, but sometimes a Chief had to be devious. Wasn't there some white man's game where to prosper later, you had to sacrifice the smallest and least playing pieces now? He just hoped he'd sacrificed the right pawn in the right way. And anyway, he'd left his medicine box here, a treasure to be explored later.

* * *

1 **(1) **_Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit. _Refer to London comedians Chas And Dave, who wrote the definitive song about it.

2 **(2) **I know. Another convoluted reference to old song lyrics**. **


	10. The endgame begins

_**Rincewind among the Redskins 10**_

**_Sorry. More political stuff, I hope tinged with humour. Get through this and you then have a large dollop of Rincewind as a reward._**

In faraway Pratoria, President Jan Blots received the Klatchian ambassador and his party with the usual diplomatic protestations of friendship and peace. Behind him, Charles Smith-Rhodes, his foreign minister, and first among the family that until the Civil War had effectively ruled the colony, stood waiting, to watch, listen and advise. Blots implicitly trusted him, as their friendship extended back over thirty years. It also acknowledged that the healing of the _Staadt _had to incorporate the Morporkian half of the country that had not only tolerated, but welcomed, being subject to their Motherland for so long. They had to be reassured of their honoured place in the new _Republik,_ so offering high office to Smith-Rhodes had been a given thing. Besides, Charles had married a Boor girl, and Jan suspected that the family would, over the years and generations, become more Boor than Morporkian.

With independence from Ankh-Morpork assured, both men now knew they were dealing with another powerful enemy, and one that was nearest to hand. It was, in fact, standing across he desk, in the form of the turbaned and hawk-nosed Prince Abdul-el-Arrack, backed by a pair of Embassy factotums.

"I must say, _Mijnheer Staaadtspresident_, that this courtesy your country has so generously extended to us has made it possible for our Embassy to perform its assigned tasks here." the Prince said, without a trace or irony or sarcasm. "Had you not declared us to be, ah, _honorary whites_, then I'm sure your so-efficient City Watch would have treated us with all the courtesy due to your _coloured _citizens, caught in the wrong part of the city without the appropriate _pass_!" **(1)**

Blots and Smith-Rhodes both caught the implicit threat, and allowed their faces to go very, very, poker. The sort of racist thugs the Watch employed were only too ready to dispense a beating to a cheeky kaffir who dared to stray into a whites-only part of the city, such as the government zone, without an exemption pass proving them to be a servant, cleaner, or other menial. The thought of a proud foreign Ambassador being worked over by Kommondant van Heerden's hired muscle was unthinkable – hence the diplomatic fudging declaring the brown-skinned Klatchians to be thought of as heavily suntanned whites.

"Indeed, your Excellency" said Charles. "but to move swiftly along to business. I'm concerned that your Government's message to us constitutes a diplomatic ultimatum. Would you care to shed some light on the matter?"

The Prince laughed. His underlings dutifully joined in.

"An _ultimatum_? Hardly, gentlemen. For an ultimatum is the last diplomatic stage before actual _war, _and would not be seemly from a long-established and powerful nation such as Klatch, to a far smaller and newly-established near-neighbour such as yourselves. In some circles, it might even be thought of as bullying, and besides, a declaration of war is so _final_, don't you think? It does rather tend to close the door to any subsequent peaceful negotiation. Which according to historical precedent, tends only to happen after one party or the other is nearly completely beaten, with subsequent regrettable loss of life, ruined economy, the risk of spoiled crops and subsequent famine, etcetera."

The Prince paused again and smiled benevolently.

"But I'm sure, as rational men of goodwill, we can sort out the pressing issue here in this office, do you not think? Now as you know, your nation recently secured independence from Ankh-Morpork following a short, but painful, war. Ankh-Morpork has her troubles elsewhere in the world, currently in Hergen and Llamedos. Their army will not return here, neither for reconquest nor as an ally to you, as they were during your Zulu War. Their horizons have shrunk, as has their Empire.

"You recently sent an Army into Central Howondaland, hubwards and widdershins of your accepted national border. We understand its purpose was to sound out and explore the land with a view to annexation into your Union. You have also set down permanent roots in the area, in the form of Fort Smith- Rhodes on the coast, well north of your current internationally accepted border. A singular honour to your family, I believe, Mr Smith-Rhodes. As they are ever at the forefront of colonization, exploration, and knowledge-gathering about this huge continent, in which my country is a major Power.

"However, my Government views your expansion with great concern. Particularly with a view to the welfare and continuing independence of the indigenous tribal peoples of the area, whom I believe are harrying your armed expedition with great vigour, not to mention vim.

"It is therefore pertinent for me to tell you that my Government respects the rights to freedom of the red-skinned tribal peoples.

My Government also recognises the value of an, ah, _quarantine zone_, or perhaps a_ demilitarized area, _serving to separate the Klatchian Empire from the Union of Rimwards Howondaland. I'm sure your government, once it has had time to reflect, will also see the immense value of our two sovereign states having no direct land border over which, inevitably and sadly, _border incidents_ may flare up. Therefore we propose that you completely withdraw your expedition from Central Howondaland. And on the way out, you dismantle and abandon Fort Smith-Rhodes."

The ambassador nodded at Charles.

"No offence meant, Charles!" he said.

"None taken, Abdullah".

The Ambassador's party made to leave.

"I'm sure you can reflect on our reasonable proposition" he said, smiling. And you can give me a reply by, let us say, three o'clock tomorrow? And I forget. . As a courtesy to you, Mr President, these are the details of some rather large training manoeuvres our Army is carrying out in Rimwards Klatch at this very moment. Just so you are not alarmed unduly by reports of a large army amassing within a month's march of your Hubwise borders, you understand, on an axis of approach that will attract friends and allies from Zululand to join us."

The ambassador handed over a slim file.

"We will return to the Embassy, gentlemen. Good day to you!"

Without waiting for dismissal, the Klatchian party left.

Jan and Charles exchanged appalled looks.

"There's only one thing we _can_ do," Charles said, flatly.

"I egree" said Jan. "I'll prepere a recall signel to Kriminel end his army. From the first despetches we've been receiving, it's clear he's in difficulties. But I went to _keep_ Fort Smith-Rhodes. Perheps the Kletchiens might eccept a compromise – if we declare it a Free City open to ell, so es to trade peacefully with the Indiens in the hinterland."

Charles nodded agreement.

"Jan" he said, thoughtfully. "The Ambassador went to the Assassins' School in Ankh-Morpork, didn't he?"

Jan Blots nodded.

"We should be planning to send some of _our_ people there. The diplomatic and political training they get is amazing!"

Jan Blots sighed. "Enkh-Morpork is, quite understendably, not speaking to us right now. A good idea, Charles, but I really don't think it'll be possible for quite a few years yet."

Charles Smith-Rhodes nodded. Maybe his great-grandson might become the first Assassin in the family…**(2)**

Then they bent to the wording of the recall signal to the Army.

**____________________________________________-----**

Rincewind shifted comfortably in his new bonds. Inside the back of a wagon and under guard, nobody was trying to harass, interrogate, hurt, damage or actively kill him. He thought this was a small price to pay for being tied up. At least they'd tied his hands in front, so that he could eat more-or-less unimpeded.

He thought back on the events of the past couple of days. After the God Coyote had dumped him in among the Seventh Cavalry, wearing, as he was, incriminating Indian warpaint and holding an Indian weapon, he had been alternately questioned and menaced by the rugged Howondalandian soldiery. He also felt disappointed that none of the Indians had attempted to rescue him, ungrateful bastards, he'd have come back for him if he's been them, and above all, he missed his Luggage, which contained the thaumic transmitter that was his only link to his correct place - Ankh-Morpork – and his current time, which he knew to be at least a hundred years after this particular _today_.

Given the typical efficiency of Wizards, they'd bring back the Luggage, miss him, and he'd have to rejoin them the long way round, always assuming he lived to be around 140.

_Goodbye Drum, goodbye a quiet life as Assistant Librarian, goodbye the new and pleasant popular acclaim from the students, and goodbye free beer, for telling his traveller's tales in the relative safety of the Drum's back bar…_

Lost in a gloomy thought, he jumped nervously when the flap of the wagon was flung aside, and Trooper Els' harsh voice was heard, inviting him to a pleasant chat with the Generals. He stumbled forward, and rough hands dragged him onto the turf.

The same rough hands dragged him forward to a larger tent than most, outside which sat a group of officers in richer and more ornate uniforms, still based on the clashing blue-and-yellow principle. He was flung on the ground in front of them.

"Here's the bloody traitor, sir!" a voice announced.

"Cut his bonds, then!" the voice of Authority ordered. Rincewind found his hands and feet freed, and was dragged upright to face his inquisitors. He regarded each, in turn. Lieutenant Gibson, the keen young officer who had effectively captured Rincewind, the Indians inexplicitly giving up their attack shortly after losing him. Captain Bentine and Major Reno, the two more senior officers in front of whom Gibson had paraded him.

Rincewind regarded a senior officer, wearing a bit of gold braiding on his uniform, with General's stars at his throat. He looked disconcertingly intelligent and had the air of a man who was good at his job. Rincewind nodded, then: tell only the truth. You don't lie to men like this. They tend to find out, and they have ways of making your subsequent life miserable.

And the fifth, wearing colonel's rank, but an awful lot more gold braid and glitter than the General. Long foppish blonde hair going to grey. A horsey face. An affected cavalry moustache, impeccably waxed. Highish cheekbones, and icy, milky, blue eyes. He reminded Rincewind of…

"Lord Rust?" he managed to get out, before a fist hit him in the kidneys and a harsh voice bid him "Silence when you speak to an officer!"

The glittering officer made a languid motion.

"Let the fellow rise!" he said, in a cultured, educated voice, Morporkian tinged with a little Howondaland.

"And do not beat him again until you are so ordered, Trooper Els. Thenk you."

Rincewind looked upon his unlikely saviour, who smiled at him, without warmth, and said "You are quite right, fellow. I am a relative of the Rusts of Ankh-Morpork. I find it gratifying that you spotted it so quickly!"

Rincewind noted that the other officers, even the General, made "tchh!" faces and rolled their eyes, as if they'd heard this a thousand times before. He bore it in mind for future reference. Then the real general spoke. His accent was much harsher Howondaland, typical of those for whom Morporkian wasn't their first language.

"I'll be honest with you." he grated. "I've got enough on my plete, whet with commending this expedition. Keeping my lines of supply open. The dey-by-dey ettrition of men lost in combet. Knowing I heven't got helf the men I need to make this demn thing work. End now, _you._ A white man caught running with the Indiens. If I were you, I'd try herd to convince this impatient end engry Boor generel thet he should _not _hev you henged, es a traitor end a potential extra headache!"

Rincewind nodded, and went into the same story he'd told Gibson, Bentine and Reno. As everything he said was complete truth, it wasn't too difficult for him to maintain a honest and woebegone expression.

"So a magical accident at the University threw you across the Discworld. You reappeared in the middle of an encampment of hostile Indians with no reason to trust or like the white man. Indeed, you were tied to a stake for nearly two days while they debated whether or not to sacrifice you by the usual means of slow agonizing torture. Eventually, they let you go, so long as you swore loyalty to them. This was tested by making you ride out in a war band against, as it turned out, Lieutenant Gibson's patrol. You utilised this as an excuse to change sides and throw yourself on our mercy, as a good white man should."

Rincewind nodded, emphatically. The foppish colonel said "That sounds reasonable enough, General Kriminel. The poor man _was _held prisoner, You can still see the rope burns on his wrists, look! Any white man held in such durance vile would seek to escape and rejoin his own!"

Kriminel nodded. "Thet mey be es so, _Colonel_ Rjuister. But. "You sey you ere a wizard. Prove it!"

To Rincewind's horror, a couple of the troopers gleefully lined up a series of empty cans and bottles on the side-rail of a cart.

"Now show me some wizardcraft!"

Rincewind looked round, horrified. He saw… a group of the half-starved prairie dogs, sniffing with canine optimism around the cookhouse lines. One, with intelligent yellow eyes, turned its head towards him.

"Go ahead, Rinso. Wave your arm around a bit! Give it some Latatian! _Do magic_!" said Coyote, in a voice only he heard.

"you bastard!" muttered Rincewind, but levelled his arm, finger pointing, at the first of the bottles. It exploded, The second one zinged off vertically into space, leaving a fireball trail behind it.

The troopers watched, nudged each other and began to applaud.

Rincewind had the sense to keep pointing, and reciting little tags of street Latatian, as the bottles and cans variously exploded, launched into space, or turned into birds that took advantage of the chance to break for freedom. He recognised Coyote working through him, and this in itself made him angrier.

The General raised a white-gloved hand.

"Ok, thet convinces me. You are a wizard. But why did you not use your ebilities to break out of captivity sooner?"

Rincewind had an answer ready.

"As a prisoner, sir, I was introduced to a very powerful Indian witch….doctor. Whose powers are, if anything, a lot stronger than mine. " This was safe enough: he'd recognised real magical ability in Anana Ogg. "This person used their powers to nullify mine and take my ability away." _And I bet she's _**still**_ got the Luggage! _

"So they hev a powerful megic-user amongst them?" Kriminel said, sharply.

"Only the one, so far as I could tell." This was also truth: Rincewind, a man used to winging it and bluffing, had recognised a kindred spirit in Dancing Weasel, the only other witch-doctor he'd been introduced to on the Indian side.

Major Reno asked a perceptive question.

"You were a prisoner of the Indians. Were you able at any time to estimate the size of the encampment and the number of hostiles there?"

Rincewind paused. He had a shrewd feeling he now had to be careful with his words, as what he said now could influence the course of the coming battle. And based on what he'd seen, his personal preference was on the Indians.

"It was _big_" he said, with truth. "Went on for miles down the side of the river." He remembered Chief Bull's personal estimate of how many warriors he could throw into battle. He also remembered that for every fighting warrior, there were likely to be up to four non-combatants.

"In fact, I'd say up to seventy or eighty thousand Indians." Rincewind reflected. "Which doesn't mean they're all fighters, of course. Say about a quarter of them are male and of fighting age. That's twenty thousand, tops?"

Rincewind was then questioned in finer detail as to weapons, horse availability, leadership, and so forth.

Finally, he was asked:-

"There's another white man we're keen to talk to. A Claus Dibbler. By all accounts he runs weapons and firewater to the redskins. Ratty little fellow, so tall, wears buckskins and a battered beaver cap. Seen him?"

Rincewind, who quite liked and sympathised with the Dibblers wherever he met them, then told his one and only outright lie.

"Good enough" said the Major. And a single interrogative. "Sir?"

"Keep him under open errest. For now. No bonds or fetters. Put him on better retions. That will be all, Mr Rincewind. I will esk to speak to you egain, however."

Rincewind was led, but not manhandled, back to his wheeled cell. He leant back and inhaled. He heard a snuffling and a scratching, and looked down to see a rat. With intelligent yellow eyes.

"You bastard!" he said, accusingly.

The rat became Coyote.

"It's all working out a treat, Rinso!" the God said, happily. "Let me tell you what those stuffed shirts are debating now. They think you're such a complete yellow-streaked coward that you've seen ten Indians where there's only really one…."

___________________________________----

"The man's a complete yellow-bellied coward!" objected Rjuister. "Sees ten Indians where there's only one!"

"I'm forced to egree with you, Reynaud. **(3)**" Kriminel said. "The fellow does not seem to be a reliable witness _et ell_. A frightened man exeggeretes the number of enemies he sees."

"At most, there can be no more than two or three thousand Indians capable of fighting. And they will be hindered by their wives and children and old people."

Rjuister's head jerked up.

"Sir, please grant me the honour of engaging the enemy in battle!"

"Reynaud, you cen perform a reconnaissance down the river Big Horn. Send petrols in to see whet they cen. But, end do not misunderstand me, the moment they encounter significant enemy force, they return to the main body of the Army, to tell me whet they see!"

"A reconnaissance in force, sir?"

"A recconnaisence in _breadth_, Reynaud. I went intelligence reports returning to me from a wide front."

Rjuister grinned, having got what he wanted.

______________________________-----

"That glory-hunting maniac Rjuister's going to attack all on his own, Rinso. He'll leave the infantry way behind so that only his cavalry can get the glory. But you know what goes with glory. Famously, in fact!"

"Yes. Met him a hundred times."

Rincewind cocked an ear to the regimental band as it struck up a jaunty, jolly, Hergenian tune, full of flounces and trills. He didn't need to recognise "_Barely Owin'_ " or to have magical ability to recognise one fairly fundamental fact about the tune. As a fully paid-up coward and Death-dodger, Rincewind had a little-known eighth sense that told him when other people were riding into doom and catastrophe. He could hear it now, in the music that was being played. If any military march was a harbinger of death, ill-luck and catastrophe, it was this one, hidden in Hergenian optimism and defiance against all the odds.

"This is it, then" he said to Coyote. "Somebody's _really_ going to die this time. They 're even playing the soundtrack."**(4)**

"You said it, Rinso"

"Glad it won't be me!" Rincewind said, rolling over and trying to go to sleep.

Coyote grinned a very private grin, and disappeared.

_______________________________----

Rincewind was awoken at five the next morning by Lieutenant Gibson and an escort of troopers. He recognised the sadistic Els among them.

"Good night's sleep?" Gibson inquired, affably. "The Colonel wants you. We're riding off soon."

"We?" said Rincewind, his skin prickling, his legs re-setting to "_run_!" Gibson made a gesture.

Two more troopers loomed up to either side and caught his arms. He gave in.

Gibson smiled, humourlessly.

"The Colonel and the General both believe you're an untrustworthy witness and you've exaggerated the number of Indians out there" he said, companiably. "For myself, even though I'm a humble lieutenant, I choose to believe that you're a very skilled coward whose cowardice makes him very good at counting numbers and estimating the odds. Which explains why he's lived so long."

Rincewind groaned. He was up against something many men feared: an intelligent and able Army officer. This had rarity value. He just wished the rarity had happened to somebody else, who might actually appreciate it.

"Now tell me again how many Indians are out there."

"Between fifteen and twenty thousand effectives capable of combat." Rincewind said, promptly.

Gibson nodded. "Thought so" he said. "And Rjuister's about to lead us into the middle of them, because he believes there's no more than two thousand."

Gibson lapsed into gloomy silence, and led his small troop to the presence of Rjuister, who was marshalling the Cavalry into battle order.

"Have you located those damn Indian scouts yet?" he demanded, petulantly.

"No, sir. The damn Scalbie all appear to have disappeared. Can't think why!" Gibson said, in an unsurprised voice.

"Well, we've found the enemy. We don't need them now!" Rjuister proclaimed. He turned his attention to Rincewind.

"We are going to do this thing quickly and resolutely"!" he shouted. "We will ride down that valley, destroy those wretched savages, and ride out again. We will gain the glory, gentlemen!"

The cavalrymen cheered. Hats flew into the air. Rjuister nodded, and turned to Rincewind.

"You gave us the information we needed. Our grateful country will thank you. But as proof of your good faith, you will be riding with us, as part of my command group. If nothing else, your presence will neutralise this native magic-user of whom you spoke. Set a Wizard to catch a Wizard, I say! And now – we ride!"

Rincewind groaned. Back into the Valley of Death, then. Again.

* * *

**(1) **Really true. In the days of the old apartheid South Africa, diplomatic staff from nations not blessed with God's gift of white skin were routinely reclassified as "honorary whites", to enable them to do their jobs properly and to save them from the tender attentions of the South African Police Force, a group capable of provoking serious international incidents in its tireless defence of a White South Africa. You couldn't make this sort of stuff up....

**(2) **He would have been pleasantly surprised to discover it was, in fact, his great-grand-daughter who became the family's first licenced Assassin. See my stories "_**The Graduation Class**_" and "_**Nature Studies**_".

**(3) Reynaud -** the English variant of this name is of course** "Ronald".**

**(4) **As mentioned before, the Roundworld military march _Garryowen _was not a lucky one to march to war behind. For the British Light Brigade at Balaclava, this was the last piece of music many of them ever heard. It was taken up by the United States Army's Seventh Cavalry. General Custer had his pipes and drums play it on the morning of Greasy Grass. Rincewind's ability is to pick up these subtle resonances on the Multiversal frequency, and correctly concluding that any Army, anywhere in the infinite Multiverse, to play this piece on the eve of combat is scoring a mighty own goal.


	11. The insanity of Colonel Rjuister

_**Rincewind among the Redskins 11**_

**Apologies for late delivery of this chapter. As might be appreciated, I had to do some research to get it as right as I could, especially in the matter of dialogue adapted from a famous film about Custer's Last Stand. Any remaining inaccuracies are mine! **

An old Indian chief called Horned Helmet was the first to spot the cavalry as it turned into the head of the Big Horn valley

Too old to fight but still alert enough to keep watch, he had volunteered for scout duty, and had alternated a night of prayer and meditation up on the high bluffs overlooking the river, alternating with listening and looking for intruders. He had seen the Scalbie scouts running into the valley and discarding their cavalry-blue coats, symbols of servitude to the white man, before proceeding deeper towards the Indian camp. He had sent Fleet Fox (who at his age was more like Arthritic Dog) to alert patrols further down the valley to capture the Scalbie. Who, he thought with distaste, were most likely to be dangling from poles and waiting for a spare partner for the Sun Dance by now. If it wasn't an insult to the Sun, that is.

As the dust cloud kicked up into the rays of the dawning sun grew nearer, he conferred with the other Elder Braves who shared this lookout position. It was decided that the seventy-eight year old Bear Cub should ride down to the camp to alert the Chiefs and rouse the younger braves to their fighting stations. This was certainly a _lot _of horse soldiers: at least thirty-score , maybe more, riding in three columns.

As he watched the dustcloud, he heard a thump and a grunt from behind him. He sighed.

"Young Eagle?"

"Yes, boss?" said the sixty-five year old Indian, youngest of the scouting band.

"Get Bear Cub back on his horse again, would you? And this time, tie him on, for safety?"

"Shay again?"

Horned Helmet sighed. It was, one way or the other, going to be a long morning.

_______________________________-----

Rjuister's column had saddled and left the _laager_ before five in the morning. At five-thirty, an exhausted and wounded despatch rider had arrived, his horse staggering with exhaustion. An arrow stood proud from the saddle. General Kriminel was awoken. He read the despatch with an impassive stony face, and had then asked the rider:

"Eny word of mouth?"

"Yes, sir. It is emphasised that a Klatchian army, sixty thousand strong, is massing on their southern border, three weeks' march away from here. The politicals don't think they're bluffing. If we don't withdraw, they'll come to force us out."

"End we cannot fight them. Well, it's obvious!"

He paused, and smiled. It was the first time he'd really smiled in weeks.

"We're going _home,_ gentlemen. Kindly tell the men."

"And Colonel Rjuister?"

"Send out gallopers. Recall him. Tell him he's court-martialled if he doesn't withdraw _immediately_ end return to the laager. There's no point in losing men now."

_____________________________________----

Rincewind rode on, gloomily, alongside the lunatic Rjuister, who was on an exalted plane of martial ecstacy, alternately praising his men, cursing the enemy, and talking to himself.

"After _this_ they will promote me back to General. They will have no choice! Oh, to prove them wrong, all those who scorned me…"

_It's even pronounced "Ruster", _thought Rincewind_. He's certifiably crazy. Just like Ronald Rust at home. Normally he's kept in check by people like Vimes and Vetinari, but remember that time he took over, during the Leshp_**(1)**_ business, and nearly destroyed us all? Well, I'm about to see what a Rust, in a position of absolute power, with no Vimes to punch him and no Vetinari to sideline him, is capable of doing. And from close up. Ohshitohshitohshit. I'm going to die._

On cue, the regimental musicians broke out in an attack of _Barely Owin'. _Rincewind appreciated the courtesy detail.

_____________________________-----

"How are we doin', Stibbons?" Ridcully brayed.

Ponder Stibbons looked up, wearily, from HEX's readout.

"According to HEX, sir, we are approaching a nexus in space-time."

"Say again, Stibbons?"

"Think of it as a fold in that rubber blanket, sir."

Ridcully looked blank for an instant, then he remembered.

"Oh yes. THAT rubber blanket you keep goin' on about as a simile for the interaction of space and time. And a nexus thingie is?"

"Think of it as a fold in the blanket, sir, that just so long as the fold is in existence, brings together two points which are normally separated by a period of time or a distance in space".

Ridcully still looked puzzled. Stibbons sighed, and stepped down a mental gear or two

"If I draw two dots on a piece of paper, sir, you will see that in normal space, they are six inches apart. But if I fold the paper through a third dimension, I can make them meet, thus."

"They're still not quite meetin', Stibbons. I can see through the paper! One of 'em's adrift by half an inch, look!"

Ponder smoothly altered the fold.

"This is the point where we can bring Rincewind and the Luggage back to their correct place and time sir. It happens in approximately ten hours. HEX is preparing to exploit the fold in the sheet."

"Hmmm." Ridcully mused. "You're forgettin' something, lad. Something possibly vital."

"Such as, sir? I assure you we've been through the maths several times…"

"No, not the maths, lad. That's a bloody untidily folded sheet. You'd better hope Mrs Whitlow doesn't see it first. You know what she's like!"

_________________________________----

Chief Bull scowled at the bedraggled and woebegone Scalbie refugees.

"What the Netherworld makes me think we can trust you two-faced forked-tongued buggers?" he demanded, of a line of Scalbies who had been securely tied to posts by their vertically stretched thumbs.

"You signed on with the white man, you have now deserted from the white man, and you want to join _us_? Pull the other one, it's got little bells on the buckskins!"

"Chief! Chief!"

Bull turned to face the running newcomer.

"They're attacking. Down the valley. As you thought they would."

"No scouts or outriders?"

"None, Chief."

"How many?"

"At least six hundred".

"Raise the camp! Get everyone out there under their war chief! Move it! If we get bodies into the agreed places we've got 'em on three sides! Everyone up and out! Find your War Chief!"

Chief Bull paused, and added, as a shouted, ululated war cry

"_**Brothers! Today is a good day for somebody else to die!"**_

Then he paused, looking at the Scalbies.

"I _may _have a use for two of you. Do as we tell you, and you might just be excused helping the ladies with their needlework."

Over the next forty minutes, a torrent of Indians poured out of the camp and into the bluffs and ravines - and the all-concealing prairie grass – completely unseen and unsuspected by the cavalry soldiers. Only a few were left, largely old men, to screen the approaches to the encampment.

As the cavalry rode deeper into the valley, it already had sizeable Indian forces on both sides of it. Very soon, they would close in behind it. Colonel Rjuister's destruction was assured.

_____________________________________------

Rjuister halted the column.

"Men, hold! We will take brief refreshment."

NCO's took up the order.

"_Dismount!"_

"_Water break!"_

As the men gratefully took up the opportunity – unaware of the silent death moving into position all around them – Rjuister beckoned Rincewind to him.

Face feverish with excitement, he called his trusted officers to him for a brief conference.

"You, fellow!" he said to Rincewind. Tell me again in what direction the Indians lie, and in what approximate numbers!"

"Can we trust him, sir?" asked Major Reno, sceptically.

"This man will be invaluable to me, Major."

Reno raised a sceptical eyebrow.

"Invaluable, sir?"

Rjuister laughed. There was a neurotic edge to the laughter.

"He was almost hanged as a renegade. He willingly came along as a scout. Oh, his game is very obvious: to lead me away from his Indian friends."

"Well, I still don't quite follow you, sir."

"Anything that man tells me will be a lie. Therefore, he will be a perfect reverse barometer. Isn't that correct? Oh, and address me as General. For I shall surely be a General again after this day's work!"

"Of course" Reno said, slowly. "General."

Rincewind sighed. "Just what I told you last night, General. There are eighty thousand of all ages. Twenty thousand males of fighting age. And just follow the river round."

"Sir, two of the Scalbie scouts have returned." Lieutenant Gibson reported.

The Scalbies want to know if you're going down the Medicine Tail Coulée. "

"Which one is that?"

"It's the one that follows the river round and to the right" Rincewind said, wearily. It leads to the main camp. You can't miss it."

Rjuister shot him a quick glance. He chose not to reply to Rincewind.

" They do, do they?"

"Yes, sir, they do" replied Gibson.. "They claim they want time to sing their death song".

"Tell the Scalbie they're women!" Rjuister replied, dismissively.

"But if the hostiles come in behind us, and if they're waiting for us below, we'll never get out of there!" objected Captain Bentine.

If Rincewind thought he'd seen a mad Rjuister before this, he now had chance to revise his opinion.

"Hostiles _behind_ us?" the would-be General almost shrieked. "I see no hostiles behind us."

He ranged his arm far and wide. His officers and Rincewind followed his movement. Rincewind fancied he could see slight movements in the long grass that could not be explained by wind. And anyway, it was shaping to be a stifling hot wondless day.

"Do you see any?" demanded the General.

"No, sir, not at the moment." Bentine conceded, reluctantly.

" Then _stop trying to cause a reversal of a Rjuister decision_!"

He turned back to Rincewind. Full of fear as he was, Rincewind still felt it was like being eyeballed by a neurotic chicken.

"But, sir, wouldn't it be best to send at least a squad down Medicine Tail Coulée?" Reno insisted.

"No, it wouldn't."

"May I ask, sir, _why_ it wouldn't?"

"Because it would cost us the vital element of surprise!"

"Surprise?" Reno repeated, incredulously. "They know we're here!"

"But they don't know that I intend to attack them without mercy".

"That's no surprise!"

"Of course it is. _Nothing_ is more surprising than the attack without mercy."

Reno was visibly gathering his wits together.

"General..." he paused, unable to find the words. "General, I must protest this impetuous decision!"

"A Rjuister decision, _impetuous_?" the General said, with mild surprise. Smuts called me impetuous, too! That uncultured Boor drunkard, sitting there in Pratoria, calling _me _impetuous!"

Reno had one last attempt. "General, I implore you to reconsider!" he pleaded. "Think of the men whose lives depend upon you. And their families!"

Rjuister turned to Rincewind.

"What should I do, Wizard?" he demanded.

"Sir, that man doesn't know anything!" Bentine protested. Rjuister ignored him.

"What do you say, Wizard? Should I go down there, or withdraw?"

Rincewind thought furiously. _I think I've got him. _

A few confused thoughts about knives and the nature of truth passed through his head. He shook them out.

"Well?" Rjuister prompted him. "What's your answer, Wizard?"

Rincewind spoke carefully and slowly, working out the steps in his mind.

General,... ...you go down there".

"You're saying, go into the coulee?"

"Yes, sir."

"There are no Indians there, I suppose?"

"I didn't say that. There are thousands of Indians down there, and when they're done with you, you stupid inbred bastard, there'll be nothing left…"

Rincewind was stuck for a simile for a moment. Then one arrived in his head as if it been hiding nearby, waiting for its chance.

"...but a greasy spot on the grass."

Rincewind, for a second, wondered if he'd gone too far. But he was dealing with what to all intents and purposes was a Rust, and since it was utterly unthinkable that a Rust would ever be abused by a lowly civilian, and a wizard to boot, it was highly possible his mind had rejected the "stupid inbred bastard" comment , as something that could not possibly have been said.

Rjuister grinned.

"Still trying to outsmart me, aren't you, Wizard? You want me to think that you don't want me to go down there…" he paused, in triumph, ...but the subtle truth is you really don't want me to go down there!"

Rincewind pretended dejection.

"Well, are you reassured now, Major?" Rjuister called, in victory. Bentine turned his face away and shook his head.

"Men of the Seventh!" Rjuister shouted. "The hour of victory is at hand! Onward to Little Bighorn and _glory_!"

A cheer shook the grass. Rincewind sighed. He was talking about glory but hadn't paused to consider Glory's inevitable stablemate. Typical general.

And then Rjuister did the one thing that truly doomed his men. He split his command and gave it three different and widely separated objectives.

Rincewind noted this and started plotting for how soon he could become Indian again. He spoke the language, after all, and he was still wearing the remains of warpaint. Maybe a moment might come for touching it up and disappearing off the battlefield altogether. And then there was the Luggage…

________________________________-----

"So what's so special about the date, Stibbons?" demanded Ridcully.

Leaving HEX to calculate for Rincewind's safe return, Stibbons and Ridcully had been dragged off to the Library by a very insistent Librarian.

"June the twenty-fifth, Central Howondalandian Plains, in the year 1903. Which is exactly where Rincewind is in time. I think the Librarian wants us to be aware of what happened on that date… "

"Ooook!" the Librarian said, for emphasis.

"During what Historians call "The Howondalandian Adventure", or the Continental Crisis, the newly-formed Boor republic of Rimwards Howondaland attempted to send a permanent military expedition into the centre of the continent with a view to further colonisation. However, this very nearly precipitated a war with the Klatchian Empire, whose government viewed an aggressively expanding state Rimwards of its border with some alarm.

"The Boors were persuaded to withdraw from the central continent following intense diplomatic pressure from Klatch, and their forces were all south of the forest belt again by the start of 1904. However, the withdrawal order did not reach the Army in the field in time to prevent a humiliating and avoidable defeat at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, fought on the 25th June, which resulted in the near-total destruction of Howondaland's Seventh Cavalry Regiment.

In 1905, a multi-partite agreement was signed, here in Ankh-Morpork, acknowledging that the Central Plains, in perpetuity, should be the reserved tribal lands for the dwindling Red Indian peoples of Central Howondaland, and none of the surrounding Powers had a right to encroach upon that land, militarily or in any other way. Klatch, Hersheba, Ankh-Morpork, Kwa'Zululand, and the Union of Rimwards Howondaland were all signatories to this treaty, as were the principal tribal chiefs. It is recorded that Big Chief Bull of the Latoka Sioux provided several peace-pipes for delegates to smoke, leading to the then Patrician of Ankh-Morpork making the famous speech, _I don't know about you gentlemen, but I ain't half feeling a bit peckish right now. And does anybody else see the funky purple spiders? _The Grand Vizier of Klatch replied to the motion with _I second the esteemed Patrician, and I move that the conference thanks Chief Bull for providing such quality shit. One day I bring a hookah and some good hash and we talk more, eh, Chiefy?"_

"All very interestin' Stibbons, but where does Rincewind fit into it?"

"Well, sir, all the Histories agree that the long-term significance of the battle was that it demonstrated to watching eyes that the Indians, hitherto thought of as a bunch of squabbling small tribes, could unite under strong leaders and completely defeat any army sent against them by a powerful, supposedly modern and civilised, neighbouring State. And after all, sir, the Boors had just conclusively beaten _us_ in open war! The Klatchians certainly lost interest in any Rimward expansion after that, and the Zulus made sure their northern border was agreed with the Apaches and the Navaho after several hundred years of back-and-forward border fighting. Our own Mr Betteridge speculates that had this war gone any other way, the Indians would have been utterly destroyed, Klatch and the Boors would have gone in and grabbed what they could, and Howondaland would have been utterly ravaged by war for the next fifty years. We'd have been forced to go in against Klatch – the _kith and kin_ argument about Rimwards Howondaland again - and the likeliest end result is that Klatch would have emerged as undisputed world superpower. What they wanted to do over Leshp, but nearly a century earlier."

"And Rincewind?"

"Here's the funny thing, sir. Both the Indians and the Boors, in their accounts of the War, have accounts of an, er, shaman who appeared from nowhere and provided, in various intangible ways, weapons, leadership, and magical assistance to enable the Indian nations to pull it together and fight. The Boor reports say that this was a Wizard from Ankh-Morpork who they briefly captured, but who managed to get away in the confusion of Rjuister's last stand. _Their_ accounts hint that this was Ankh-Morpork's malicious interference in their affairs, as our twisted revenge for losing the Boor War. They believe this evil Wizard manipulated Colonel Rjuister's mind and led him to his death, along with most of his Regiment."

"RUSTER? No wonder they lost, then! Wouldn't trust a Rust to clean me boots!"

"And this book reproduces a picture. A sort of needlework tapestry, commissioned in honour of the Great White Shaman _{{He-Who-Washes-The-Wind}}."_

"That's a _very_ pale leather, Stibbons. Wonder what sort of animal it came off.."

"Indeed, sir. You will note a long thin stylised Wizard. In a ragged robe. And a pointy hat. And that's not all. The creature here is described as "unidentifiable in Indian myth and legend but may be an artistic representation of the Shaman's reservoir of power."

"It's a bloody _box_, Stibbons. With legs!"

"I believe we have tangible evidence of Rincewind's interference in history in this place and time, sir."

Ridcully stroked his beard, thoughtfully.

"Or of Rincewind bein' used as the tool for _somebody else_ to interfere with history. If the alternative was mass destruction of the Redskins, fifty years of bloody war, and Klatch endin' up too powerful for everybody, I'd lay good money on those little buggers in saffron stickin' their oar in. I smell History Monks, Stibbons!"

"They're just a legend, Arch-chancellor!"

"No legend, lad. You live to my age as a Wizard, so see many strange things and meet many strange people. They exist, alright" They just keep themselves well-hidden. And this is just the sort of thing they'd do!"

* * *

**_Rjuister will meet his doom and Rincewind returns to the University in Chapter Twelve, coming soon. _**

* * *

**(1)**_** What I did in the Leshp War, by Rincewind:- **_Heard war declared and regiments were raising. Packed Luggage with food and warm clothing. Went to hide in deepest University cellar I could find. Got the Librarian to bring periodic news. Returned to surface when Vetinari restored, Leshp resunk, and emergency over.


	12. The Day of Greasy Grass

_**Rincewind among the Redskins 12: The Day of Greasy Grass**_

After despatching Reno to the left with a hundred and eighty men, and Bentine to the centre with a hundred and twenty, to face what he judged would be minimal Indian opposition, Rjuister led the lion's share of the Seventh down the Medicine Tail Coulée so as to be able to obliterate the Indian encampment with overwhelming force. He would come sweeping through the Indian village bringing death and destruction in his wake, with Reno and Bentine's forces converging on his as the other jaw of a pincer moving to encircle the hostiles, to cut them off from all hope of retreat, and to destroy them in detail.

It was a good plan in theory and might have worked if Rjuister had commanded a cavalry division, not a mere regiment, and if there had been a lot less hostiles with pressing and immediate reasons to fight back.

Rincewind had long since passed the point where, left to himself, he kept falling off things with four legs unless securely tied to them. Especially if he had good reason to stay on – let's say if pursued by hundreds, no, _thousands_, of implacable savage warriors prepared to treat him as an enemy just because he was riding with the horse-soldiers they were at war with – he tended to stay on, these days. His new-found _riding-away_ skills were a logical extension of his unhorsed _running-away_ abilities.

And right now, on the Medicine Tail Coulée, Rincewind was doing what he was good at. In this case, riding away in a frenzy of gibbering fear and mortal terror.

In front of him, he had heard a last protest from Reno to Rjuister, just before the Major had been sent away to attend to his own orders.

"This is madness, sir! All these ravines and escarpments! This is not cavalry country, sir! We cannot gallop, we cannot charge, we will inevitably lose men and mounts. And even that the trail, that _Coulée_, will only allow you to ride three or four abreast!You'll be strung out for the best part of half a mile, sir!"

Rjuister had not listened, and had swung his men down the trail. Riding near him at the front of the column, Rincewind had thought he could hear muted disbelieving sniggers, hastily cut off, from the long grass on the sloping bluffs to the right, and down in the thickly grassed ravine to the left.

His mind raced. _If I were Bull, I'd hold everyone back until Rjuister has committed his entire column to riding on this trail, when even if he wanted to, he couldn't about-turn half a mile of cavalrymen strung out in a thin line. Once he's committed them, the only possible way they can ride on a trail this narrow is forwards. **Then** I'd hit them with everything I'd got, from both sides. I'd give it maybe, fifteen, twenty minutes?_** (1)**

Rincewind considered the bluffs to the right and the ravines to the left. There was room for quite a lot of Indians to hide in the undergrowth, waiting for the moment.

_This is it then. Ohshitohshitohshit, I'm going to die!_

_____________________________________-----_

Another man who had made the same assessment of the situation was Lieutenant Gibson. As the most junior officer, his troop was right at the very back of Rjuister's column and would enter the Medicine Tail Coulée last of all. Gibson remembered the last conversation he had had with Reno and Bentine.

_When the moment comes, your first, only, and last duty is to the thirty-odd men in your troop. If Rjuister is hell-bent on getting everyone else slaughtered, you have to leave him to it and find a a way to save your men. You'll know what to do when the time comes._

Hre deliberately held his men back from the rest of the column. This had to be carefully judged: going too fast would lead them into hell. Going too slowly could afterwards be termed cowardice or deliberate dereliction of duty. He kept a clear idea of where Bentine and Reno were in relation to him and assessed the distance.

Holding back Ensign Caffrey, he waited and watched the sign, allowing a wider and wide gap to open between him and F-Troop in front. Then it happened, as if a hidden someone had touched off a powder trail. The bluffs above and the ravines below exploded with Indians, some mounted, mainly on foot, whooping and war-crying, running in close to press and harry the cavalry. It all started further up the line, where Rjuister was, (and, Gibson noted with satisfaction, Captain Quirke would be) and flowed back towards the tail, a flow made up of thousands of painted Indians.

Gibson called his bugler to sound the "withdraw!" just as Indians began exploding form the grass around them, flowing in to attack the rear of F-Troop, irrevocably cutting Gibson's troop off from the main column.

_Well, that's it. I'm cut off from Rjuister's command now and I can quite legitimately issue my own orders. _

"About-turn! Ride for Captain Bentine's column!" Gibson ordered, spurring his horse into a gallop. His men, momentarily shocked, needed no urging, and followed him at a full gallop back the way they had come, using the weight of their horses to barrel through the onrushing natives.

There was trouble behind them and on the left flank too, although it appeared the bulk of the hostiles were chasing down Rjuister, preferring to attack the column led by the great white chief. _They can come back later for us, probably_, thought Gibson, as he slashed at a warpainted face with his sabre arm, trying desperately to maintain control of his horse with the reins in his left.

He could see both Bentine and Reno had come to grief. Their respective charges had faltered in the face of the broken ground and the massive press of hostiles. Gibson could also see that both columns had been forced to a defensive position on whatever high ground they could reach, and that there was now no Discly way of breaking through to Bentine: the press of enemy around the knoll his men now defended was just too thick. Gibson revised his order, seeing that further on, Reno had been similarly forced to cover, but his command was not yet completely beset by Indians, There was, fleetingly, clear ground between them. He ordered :

"_Make for Major Reno! Repeat, make for Major Reno!"_

They barely made it: a trickle of men were lost all the way across the broken ground, victims of groups of Indians leaping up from seemingly nowhere, physically dragging troopers off their horses heedless of flashing sabres, or taking advantage of sheer bad luck, men thrown when horses stumbled on the uneven broken ground that Reno had warned was no good for horsemen.

But, slowly, agonisingly slowly, they were within range of defensive fire put up by Reno's men, who had been forced to go to ground on a high knoll, and the Indian surge let off to allow them into a friendly enclave. Gibson shook hands with Reno.

"Lieutenant Gibson reporting, sir. Cut off from the main body by hostile action. Beg to report one officer, three NCO's, and… twenty-two other ranks."

He paused.

"Ten men lost in action."

Reno gave his shoulder a steadying pat.

"Better than the full thirty-six. You did well. Get some of your men posted down there in the dip with the horses. Watch for Indians getting in to the horse lines. We're going to need them to get out. Colonel Rjuister…" their eyes fell on a distant dust-cloud, with red figures darting in and out of it, one whom was leading a booty horse, "..is, I fear, beyond our help now. But I warned him!"

__________________________________________-----

That twenty-minute ride was something that Rincewind would rate as one of the ten most horrible and frightening experiences of his life. Even though horse-bows were firing and sabres were flashing, Rjuister's long strung-out column was taking a severe pounding from the Indians harrying it on both sides. Rincewind had a nightmare glimpse of a trooper brought down screaming by three Indians. Seconds later, there was the flash of a knife and a brave was whooping, waving something both hairy and bloody as a taunt to Rjuister's horse-soldiers. Other Indians were donning the jackets and hats of dead troopers, partly as booty, partly because it made it difficult until they _really_ got up close to see who was who.

The sadistic Trooper Els coolly shot one such in the face with a horsebow, sending him flying back over the saddle. Rincewind gloomily noted that whatever else Els was, he wasn't a coward.

"Sir! Colonel Rjuister! " called a sergeant. "We must get off this track! There's a hill over there we can defend!"

Rjusiter nodded assent, and steered to his left, pointing with his sabre. Rincewind took stock as the cavalry poured to the illusory safety of the knoll, which overlooked the Indian village. Already, fresh Redskins were pouring out of the village, most mounted, to put a physical block between Rjuister and his target. As for Rjuister, his first sight of the sheer size of the Indian encampment he had hoped to overwhelm seemed to leave him stunned: that, and the weight of numbers facing him, appeared to restore a temporary measure of sanity, or something approximating it.

But he had barely two hundred men left, perhaps two hundred and thirty at most, of well over three hundred he'd set out with. In twenty short minutes, his command had been stripped by a third, in the sheer attrition of running the Indian gauntlet. Rincewind tried to guess Indian losses: there were a lot of red bodies out there. Two hundred, maybe three? Out of twenty thousand, not a great number. But most of them would have family back there…

Men tried to draw semblance of order out of the chaos. Some men tried to wrangle the horses into a makeshift herd, one man to every five or six sets of reins, as the rest dismounted and set up a long defensive circle with the horses inside. Some men, but by no means all, even thought to grab their reserve of spare crossbow bolts from their saddlebags first, before surrendering their mounts. But by then, they were in the middle of a swirling line of mounted Indians, shooting bows and crossbows into the defensive line, firing over the heads of the dismounted soldiers into the horses, trying to take out the horse-handlers as preference targets. Panicked horses started to free themselves and gallop off, often to have their reins taken by Indians who vaulted into the saddle and joined in the circling mass of attackers. The defensive circle broke and shrank as men dropped. Men who were now losing their horses and their last chance of escape, their mounts either bolting or killed or captured.

Some men philosophically dropped behind the cover of dead horses and began picking their shots, methodically seeking to take as many Indians as possible with them.

Rincewind just dropped to the ground, rolled into a ball, and whimpered.

Trooper Els, evil and savage, grinned at him.

"I'll take you with me, renegade. There's no escaping from this one, not for anybody."

In the press, Rjuister was methodically loading, firing, and reloading his pistol crossbows, now just another man among many dying men, his command shattered, the end a matter of time. But his eyes betrayed his insanity and his words betrayed that reality was something he may have glimpsed retreating fro him at full speed some time earlier in the day.

"We've caught them napping! Sound the charge! We have them on the run!" Rjuister bellowed, as one of his men caught a crossbow bolt through the chest and slumped to the ground.

"Take no prisoners!" he roared, as another man fell to earth.

"Get off of your knees, men! Rjuister's with you! Rjuister's up! Stay with me!"

Rincewind tried to shut the awful noise of battle, of screaming horses, of dying men, of whooping Indians, of the whosh and meaty thud of crossbow bolts, of Rjuister's burbling insanity, out of his head. And failed.

"What are they doing?" Rjuister said, in a plaintive querulous voice. "Why aren't they charging?"

"Because there's nowhere to charge to." Said a voice. It took a second or two for Rincewind to register that it was his.

Rjuister looked around him. Men were steeling themselves to kill the last of the horses to deny them to the Indians and to make a last defence breastwork with. Rincewind thought it was a hateful sight. What had those poor horses done to anybody to be slaughtered this way? _Slaughter… ohshitohshitohshit, I'm going to die…_

"Fools! They're shooting their own horses! Arrest them! Arrest them!" screamed Rjuister.

"Bugler! Sound the charge!" But nobody was listening.

Dully, Rincewind saw the mounted Indians were pulling back now. A wave of Indians was streaming forward on foot to fininsh the job. Almost pathetically, the last survivors of the Seventh waited for them.

"We've got to make breastworks! Make breastworks, men!" Rjuister bleated, somewhat behind the times. The Indians attacked.

"Show them no mercy! I said, give them a volley!"

One of the last surviving sergeants lifted his head and said

" We're running out of ammunition"..

Then he turned from his broken reed of a colonel to the business of picking the enemies his last few crossbow bolts would kill.

-"Right".muttered Rjuister. Now we are running out of ammunition. I told him this would happen!".

To Rincewind's pity and disgust, Rjuister went into a dribbling self-pitiyng rant against the politicians who'd brought all this about by demoting him from the rank of General. Then as the Indians closed in to the last of the defensive perimeter, and the eerie silence was broken by fresh war-cries and screams, a little reality surfaced.

"This is horrible. We're being wiped out!"

"Oh. You've noticed, have you?" muttered Rincewind.

Go on, White Howondaland! Let your arrows fly, savages! I am unbowed! I am Rjuister!"

Rincewind found his voice speaking again, unbidden.

"Why don't you shut up?"

The ice-cold blue eyes locked onto the wizard.

"You, man! Get on your feet and face the enemy!"

One of the pistol crossbows swung to point at Rincewind. The Indians were now well among the last men standing. Only a handful of cavalrymen were left to face them.**(2)**

" Go away, General." Rincewind muttered, now somewhere on the far side of fear and feeling oddly calm about it all. He saw the Indians coming up behind Rjuister, doing a double-take and nudging each other. And there were other figures there…

**G****OOD MORNING, RINCEWIND.**

"Is it still only morning?"

**EIGHT-FIFTY AY-EMM, ACCORDING TO CENTRAL HOWONDALANDIAN TIME. **

"Doesn't time drag, when you're having a thoroughly miserable and frightening time?"

**INDEED, RINCEWIND. **

Death took an hourglass from his robe and looked at it.

From a further distance, he heard Rjuister say, in normal time

" All right. The sentence is death."

He levelled the crossbow at Rincewind, who looked, without fear (Death was _such_ an oddly calming influence) at a point just behind Rjuister's shoulder.

At the tomahawk that thudded down onto his head, sending the former General slumping silently to the ground.

"Uggg" Rincewind said. "Why does it always have to be so _messy_?"

**GENERAL GEORGE REYNAUD RJUISTER?**

The shade of the Cavalry officer sat up, and looked down at what was being done to his corpse.

"I see" he muttered. "Well, I suppose the Redskin won that trophy fair and square." And then it registered.

"You called me _General_?"

"**YOU HEARD CORRECTLY. **Death said, swinging the sword gently.

**NORMALLY I WORK WITH THE SCYTHE, BUT GENERALS, LIKE ROYALTY, ARE ALLOWED THE PRIVILEGE OF THE SWORD. THEY LIVE BY IT, AFTER ALL. **

The General's shade stood up.

"I never wanted this. I wanted to be a participant in such a glorious battle that it would still be talked about and discussed in military colleges and history lessons a hundred years from now. That the name of Rjuister will never die".

**STRANGELY ENOUGH, THAT WISH HAS BEEN FULFILLED. IN EVERY RESPECT. I CAN ASSURE YOU YOUR NAME WILL BECOME A BYWORD FOR A PARTICULAR SORT OF MILITARY SPECIALITY. AND EVEN THOUGH YOU DIED A COLONEL, IN DEATH YOU WILL BE REMEMBERED AS A GENERAL.**

Death ushered the shade of Rjuister onwards.

"Oh…my…"

The dead of the Seventh Cavalry were in full rank and order, waiting for him. Every so often there was another "pop" and their ranks were augmented by one.

Troop-Sergeant Callaghan and Lieutenant Colhouhoun saluted smartly.

"Seventh Cavalry awaiting general's inspection, sir!"

**AND YOU GET TO RIDE THE HAPPY HUNTING GROUNDS TOGETHER. THIS IS ONLY FITTING, REALLY. **

Death disappeared. In his place, War rode forward and saluted Rjuister.

"Be honoured to take the inspection, old boy" he said.

Back on the battlefield, Rincewind goggled at the Indian who was triumphantly holding up the bloody scalp of Ruijster.

"_Two-Dogs?"_

"Strike a bleedin' light, it's Mr Rincewind!" Dogs exclaimed. "Bucket, help Mr Rincewind out of bother, would you? Any of the lads who don't know him see him, he's in _strife_!"

Rincewind looked gratefully into One-Man-Bucket's grinning face.

"Just get that robe off, Mr Rincewind. You're in buckskins underneath, and there's still some warpaint showing from the other day, that's _good. _We was all really impressed, by the way, when you charged 'em single-handed and counted coup on eight of the buggers! Now give me your hat."

Bucket pushed the point of the hat down inside itself, and reshaped it into something looking like a floppy Indian hat with a squared-off crown.

"Anana said to get you out safe. She thinks it won't be long before your people come looking for you, you and your medicine box. Ah, she sewn a band on it. Lovely. Let's get you looking more like an Indian…"

Bucket foraged, and found a fallen Indian with a lot of feathers in his headdress.

"He won't need this any more, poor bugger. Now let's see how it works. Anana told me. You rode out on the warpath the other day. And you're here today. That's two long feathers."

He plucked them out of the bonnet and threaded them into Rincewind's hat band.

"And you counted coup eight times. That's eight shorter ones.."

Rincewind was presented with a modified Wizard's hat with ten feathers in it.

"That'll do. You look like one of us now. Let's get you back to the camp."

"Not while I'm standing. I said I'd kill you, renegade!"

It was Trooper Els, still standing, still a bottle covey, still a thug, who still carried a loaded crossbow. He lifted it and pointed it at the Wizard.

"Say goodbye, Wizard!"

And then the Luggage, striped with warpaint, bowled into him, lid open. There was a crunching noise, and finally a long mahogany-red tongue licked round the lid.

"Uggh" said Bucket and Dogs together. "Does it do that sort of thing a lot?"

"You'd be surprised" Rincewind said. "I've never worked out where they _go_, that's the funny thing!"

Together, the battle over, the three of them made the short walk back to the encampment.

"I see you kept the Luggage safe" Rincewind said, conversationally.

"Well, to be honest, Chief Bull got Dancing Weasel to try and open it. Weasel had enough brains to make the Scalbie Indians we captured do the hard work. After it sort of ate two of them, we all thought better of it."

"Sort of ate?"

"It spat them out, though. Or sicked them up."

Rincewind nodded. Back to normal, then.

They walked on in silence.

__________________________________-----

The gallopers sent out by General Kriminel to recall Rjuister got far enough into the valley to witness the death of the Seventh from a distance. They were shocked by the sheer number of Indians the army faced. Two scattered groups of cavalrymen were still fighting. But they saw, through binoculars, the destruction of the third and largest group. Knowing the cavalry was beyond aid, they sadly turned to ride back.

_________________________________-----

"Do we send men down to kill them?" Crazy Horse asked Chief Bull, noticing the gallopers in the distance.

"No. Let them report back. It will take the heart from the rest."

________________________________----

The fighting around Reno's and Bentine's positions grew more intense, but at least here the troopers had had time to prepare an intelligent defence without deliberately sacrificing any horses.

Even though crazed by heat and lack of water, they kept up their defence all day against repeated attacks, losing a steady but significant trickle of men, with brave men volunteering to scavenge for re-useable crossbow bolts from the dead and the debris of war, and other brave men fighting down to a nearby stream to replenish at least some water bottles.

With the onset of night, the Indians broke off their attacks. They knew warriors who died in darkness faced additional post-mortem perils on their way to the Happy Hunting Grounds, and much preferred resuming combat by daylight.

But there wasn't going to be a second day. Reno and Bentine cautiously exchanged scouts and messages, and decided they had only one chance. They took it, electing to retreat by night, a cautious trot that became a near gallop as the braver Indians chose to risk post-mortem hazards and fight them anyway.**(3)**

Fewer than a hundred men returned to the laager that night. Kriminel, his cavalry gone, gave orders for the retreat to begin in the morning.

____________________________________----

Not all the Seventh died or took their own lives on Greasy Grass.

Rincewind witnessed an unedifying scene as a weeping and cowardly officer, a captain, was dragged into camp by the Indians who had captured him. They had found him huddled up, trying to raise the nerve to shoot himself with a crossbow and failing, and had elected to take him alive.

"You're a white man? You're both white? Oh thank the gods! I'm Captain Quirke, Seventh Cavalry. The savages took me alive! They'll torture me and kill me! Help me. You're obviously well in with the brutes!"

Rincewind turned to Skin-Meself-Alive-Dibbler, who'd opted to remain a guest of the Indians for the duration.

"Well… I saw what they did to that Indian clan out there. to the women and kids. That was brutal!"

"And his face looks familiar. yes, Anana Ogg's scrying glass. She witnessed it all. You were there, you bastard. You could have stopped it!" said Rincewind. He wasn't normally vindictive and could respect a fellow abject coward, but not one who'd done what this one had. Besides, after a battle, you had to have captive enemy for the Sun Dance and the sewing, didn't you? Very important and traditional. You didn't mess with tradition, nor did you try and muck with anthropologically established and vital tribal folklorique pathways.

He turned his back.

"_Help me_!" screamed Quirke.

Rincewind looked at him.

"Oh, I'll help, alright. After what I saw, I'll help them thread the needles!"

It was said later that that the captive white man lasted nearly four days and was a well-aspected offering to the Gods.

But Rincewind saw nothing of this.

It was during the victory feast. He was asking the brothers about their plans.

"I think I'll stay on" Two Dogs said, cheerfully, regarding Small Damson. "There's a lot this land can offer a bloke, Mr Rincewind. A lot. Besides, Chief Bull wants to rename me. Says that I did a great deed in battle and can take on a new name as I was reborn in war. I can be Two Dogs Fighting."

His eyes misted over and he smiled. "It's a big country, Mr Rincewind. Under big skies."

One-Man-Bucket smiled.

"I'll stay for the wedding, Mr Rincewind. Then I'll be going home to Ankh-Morpork. Maybe go into construction, like our old man. He had a head for heights, our dad. Right up until the accident with the high wind and the ornamental gargoyle."

He paused, and asked

"Mr Rincewind, Anana says I'll do alright in the end. She seems to think I'll end up saving the city from some peril or other?"

Rincewind nodded. _But first you get disillusioned and dead drunk and then just dead. Then life begins again when Mrs Cake stars touting the Afterlife for a spirit medium. And then you save the City._

"Just don't give up hope, Bucket. That's the key thing. And give my regards to the Drum when you get home! It's the Broken Drum to you, isn't it?"

"Can't see our local ever being called anything else!"

A couple of peace-pipes circulated before dinner. It was a reflective smoke, punctuated by victory song, the lamenting of widowed squaws, and the distant screaming of Quirke. Anana Ogg had excused herself, having joined with the Ladies' Sewing Circle to offer advice and encouragement to the needleworkers.

Rincewind was inclined to be thankful and generous: he pretended not to notice the Luggage slipping into the circle and persuading various Indians to blow some smoke into its keyhole.

As Rincewind was receiving the fulsome thanks of the Latoka and honorary tribal membership he felt the Disc slipping under him. He tried to hang on to the Luggage for support, but everything whirled and slipped and danced in a way he couldn't wholly blame on the smoke.

And then he was sprawled on familiar flagstones in the High Energy Magic Building, with Ridcully looking down on him and saying "Welcome home, that man!" and "Now you're back, you can start doin' some _serious_ lesson-plannin' for your new teachin' career!"

Rincewind sighed. He was home. And by the feel of the day, he might be able to talk Glenda in the night kitchen into providing him a cheese-and-potato pie. He hadn't eaten one for over a hundred years…

* * *

**(1)** Anyone wondering about Rincewind's ability to acccurately work out military strategy should remember that he is a direct linear descendant of the great Ephebian general Laveolus, another abject coward who, uniquely among generals, was capable of thinking about what he was doing, and devising strategies to win battles with the absolute minimum loss of men and material and most crucially, minimal risk to _himself_.

**(2)** This is a fairly accurate acount of the last moments of General Custer at the Big Horn. The battle itself, so far as Custer was concerned, lasted less than an hour from start to finish. A lot of the dialogue has been freely adapted from the film "Little Big Man", with Rincewind playing the Dustin Hoffman role.

**(3)** On Roundworld, Major Reno and Captain Bentine fought seperate battles but combined forces later in the day. Luckily, they had the pack horses with the reserve ammunition. They were only relieved by an infantry attack the following day, but their joint action possibly prevented complete destruction of the Seventh. Afterwards, with the Custer myth in full force, they were treated shabbily by the US Army and the press: accustations were levelled that Reno had been cowardly in not riding to Custer's rescue, despite the weight of enemy numbers and the impassibility of the ground for cavalry. The myth arose that the heroic General Custer had been abandoned by the coward Reno. Neither Reno nor Bentine advanced in rank in the US Army and both ended their careers low down the ladder, not even having regimental commands. And Custer, after death, is erroneously thought of by many as having been a general, so he got _one_ thing he wanted...

* * *

**_There may be an epilogue wrapping up loose ends, but this tale is now substantially finished. _**


End file.
